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Category: UK

  • A Republican talking head called for the ‘elimination of transgenderism’ – but the UK beat him to it

    On 4 March, American commentator and media host Michael Knowles called for the elimination of “transgenderism” at a Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Knowles hosts a podcast for the right-wing media outlet Daily Wire. His comments rightfully drew intense scrutiny and pushback from commentators and publications on the internet.

    In particular, Knowles called Rolling Stone’s chosen headline “libelous” and demanded a retraction:

    CPAC Speaker Calls for Transgender People to be ‘Eradicated’

    Knowles said:

    For the good of society … transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely — the whole preposterous ideology, at every level.

    He called for the eradication of “transgenderism”, as if this is not synonymous with the eradication of trans people. However, the problem from a UK standpoint is that transphobic ‘gender critical’ activists have used similar rhetoric here for years. You might have heard it on our national broadcaster or in the halls of our government.

    What’s more, it hasn’t received anywhere near enough pushback.

    Eliminationist rhetoric

    The argument from Knowles and his ilk is that trans people do not exist. We are merely confused people afflicted by ‘gender ideology’ or ‘transgenderism’. Our detractors frame this ‘ideology’ as a set of beliefs and practices, rather than a state of being.

    Knowles has made statements similar to his CPAC speech on his podcast. In 28 February’s installment of the Daily Wire‘s The Michael Knowles Show, he said:

    I don’t know how you could have a genocide of transgender people because genocide refers to genes, it refers to genetics, it refers to biology. And the whole point of transgenderism is that it has nothing to do with biology.

    He went on:

    But furthermore, nobody’s calling to exterminate anybody because the other problem with that statement is that transgender people is not a real ontological category. It’s not a legitimate category of being.

    It is easy to recognise this wording as fascist. Stating that being trans is not “a legitimate category of being” is dehumanisation. This is one of the hallmarks of fascism. A genocide cannot take place against trans people because there aren’t any trans people, he says. Exactly how Knowles intends to eliminate ‘transgenderism’ is left to the listener’s imagination.

    What does elimination look like?

    The most obvious course of action would be to make trans people cis. However, so-called ‘conversion therapy’ – the attempt to convince a trans person that they are not trans – doesn’t work. What’s more, it is actively dangerous to the people it is inflicted upon – it doubles the rate of suicide in recipients.

    So if a trans person cannot be made cis, what does our eradication look like?

    You might try to convert me anyway, and damn the fact that it might kill me. After numerous u-turns, the UK government only saw fit to outlaw this two months ago.

    Alternatively, you could take away my healthcare. The British public, at least, believes that trans healthcare should be the purview of the rich, who can afford private access. Just 33% think that the NHS should provide hormone replacement therapy.

    Failing this, you might simply try to make trans lives unlivable. Just removing equalities protections would be enough to enable bigots to freely abuse trans people. PM Rishi Sunak has already indicated that he wishes to remove trans protections from the equality act, which would enable this abuse.

    Eliminationism in the UK

    Of course, there is always the option of outlawing ‘being trans’ altogether. Even if you can’t stop a trans person being trans, you could stop them from saying that they are trans, from participating in public life as a trans person. The UK already treats the recognition of our gender as a reward for compliance; our genders are recognised until that becomes inconvenient, until we become inconvenient. But some transphobes want to go even further.

    Back in 2021, the Women’s Human Rights Campaign (WHRC) submitted a response to a government inquiry into the Gender Recognition Act. Referring to a UN convention on discrimination against women, the WHRC declaration said:

    The convention calls for the ‘elimination of prejudices and customary and all other practices which are based on the idea of the inferiority or the superiority of either of the sexes or on stereotyped roles for men and women’ (Article 5).

    We can all get behind that, right? The elimination of prejudice and stereotypes based on sex – sign me up. However, the document continued:

    We consider that the practice of transgenderism clearly falls under this article because it is based on stereotyped roles for men and women.

    If this sounds familiar, it should. The reference to “transgenderism”, its framing as a “practice”, the call for its “elimination” – all of it beat Knowles to the post two years ago. UK transphobia recycled in the US: who’d have thought it?

     …And the condemnation?

    As reported by Pink News, the signatories to the declaration include the LGB Alliance, Transgender Trend, Labour Women’s Declaration, WoLF (Women’s Liberation Front), Standing For Women, Safe Schools Alliance UK, and For Women Scotland.

    However, rather than being widely recognised as calling for trans elimination, supporters of the WHRC have been granted media attention and government influence. The Tory Party conference has hosted the LGB Alliance two years in a row. Stephanie Davies-Arai, founder of Transgender Trend, was awarded the British Empire Medal in the Queen’s birthday honours. For Women Scotland appeared before Scottish parliament to argue that new hate crime laws might do too much to stop it from being transphobic.

    The eliminationism supported by these groups is the same as that spat out by Knowles to Republican applause. Both work towards the destruction of my way of life, and that of my trans siblings.

    I am trans. We are trans. We cannot be stopped from being trans. However, without something fundamental changing in the UK’s attitude to trans people, we can and will be stopped from being.

    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/Gage Skidmore, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0, resized to 770*403

    By Alex/Rose Cocker

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Just when you thought Britain couldn’t get any more racist, the Tories bring the Illegal Migration Bill

    Rishi Sunak has announced that refugees arriving into the UK by small boats will be permanently banned from re-entering the country. Ahead of Tuesday’s unveiling of the racist Illegal Migration Bill, the government told the Daily Mail:

    This new Bill, if passed by Parliament, will mean that if you come here illegally, not only will you be swiftly removed from the UK, but you will never be able to come back.

    The measures will ensure that anyone who has risked their lives in the Channel’s perilous waters, and has made it to England, will be deported. However, the home secretary could also send them to Rwanda, or a “”safe” third country”, as soon as possible. Refugees will also be unable to apply for British citizenship. Nor will they be able to come to the country as a visitor in the future. In summary, if someone has arrived in the UK in a small boat, their asylum claim will be inadmissible.

    Refugees and people seeking asylum in the UK currently have the right to apply for protection. This is under the UN’s Refugee Convention and the European Convention on Human Rights. However, as the Mail reported:

    New laws will also restrict Channel migrants from using human rights laws to avoid removal from Britain, it is understood. The Bill is likely to severely limit the way claims under Labour’s Human Rights Act can be used by asylum seekers who arrive by irregular routes.

    Yes, that’s right: our government is so desperate to stop brown and Black people from living in the UK that it’s seeking to circumvent human rights laws.

    Racist, ransacking Britain

    The government official told the Daily Mail:

    It is bad enough that illegal migrants currently abuse our asylum system to frustrate their removal. But it is far worse that they can currently settle here permanently and apply to become a citizen. The ability to settle in this country and become a British citizen is not a human right, it is a privilege – which is why we will ban illegal migrants from ever coming back to the UK after we have removed them.

    Of course, the government doesn’t actually say how refugees are abusing the system to “frustrate their removal”. Rather, it assumes that the public will swallow these baseless racist statements without questioning them. And it’s probably a fair assumption, judging from the recent uptick in far-right activity against refugees.

    The deluded Tories still cling to the idea of Britain as a world-dominating empire. To them, it is the greatest of countries: a place where brown or Black people should be “privileged” to be granted space. Meanwhile, just like in the time of the Empire, the government believes it’s Britain’s given right to continue to ransack other countries.

    Let’s not forget that it is this country which was instrumental in wrecking Afghanistan. It is our government – albeit under Labour’s Tony Blair – that lied about Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction in order to begin an illegal war. And it is this country that has bombed Syria, as well as causing carnage in Libya. Meanwhile, our arms companies – which have links to government officials – are laughing, cashing in on the billions made in profits from never-ending war. Britain’s role has been essential for destablising the Middle East and northern Africa. Yet our government washes its hands of any responsibility. Worse than this, it treats the very people whose lives it has ravaged as sub-human.

    Scapegoating refugees

    It is a time-tested method for governments to find scapegoats to blame for their own terrible messes. The government hopes that if it blames ‘outsiders’, this will distract people from the real facts. As Sunak harps on about “illegal migration” not being “fair on British taxpayers”, he hopes we won’t notice that it’s his government that is to blame for soaring inflation, the cost of living crisis, and a failing NHS. Meanwhile, energy giants such as Shell reap billions in profits while we literally die in our homes.

    As for Sunak, he’s one of the richest people in the whole country. He’s likely the wealthiest person ever to have graced the halls of Number 10. He features on the Sunday Times Rich List with a net worth of £730 million. The Sunaks’ main home (yes, they have three) in Kensington is worth £7 million alone. With their obscene wealth, they look down on those who want a life without war and poverty.

    It’s likely that if Sunak found himself aboard a packed dinghy on a choppy English Channel, he wouldn’t last five minutes. And if he fell overboard, I’m not too sure I would save him.

    Featured image via YouTube/screenshot

    By Eliza Egret

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • ‘Things are not looking so great in Great Britain’: UK university faculty hit the picket lines

    The United Kingdom is undergoing a massive wave of industrial action this winter as the cost of living crisis bites. Most recently it’s been the university higher education professionals who have been on strike. The Real News Network spent time at picket lines across London as the University College Union, or UCU walked out from their work in a dispute over pay and pension cuts. The UCU has thousands of members across the UK and hundreds of colleges and universities have picket lines. The strikes, which are happening amongst dozens of other labor disputes are the biggest in the UK since the Thatcher years. This video is part of a special Workers of the World series on the cost of living crisis in Europe.

    Producer, videographer, and video editor: Ross Domoney

    This story, with the support of the Bertha Foundation, is part of The Real News Network’s Workers of the World series, telling the stories of workers around the globe building collective power and redefining the future of work on their own terms.

    Transcript

    Protester: “Union – power!”

    Narration: Across the UK, the University and College union, or UCU, is on strike. Multiple university and college campuses have picket lines and tens of thousands of the UCU members have walked out from their work.

    Protester: There is a sense in the country of things having been pushed past the brink.

    Narration: The UCU is made up of higher education professionals, which includes lecturers, academics, researchers, librarians, and postgraduates in universities and colleges.

    Protester:  Do we want a 5% pay cut this year? No. When they offer a 5 pay rise, what do they really mean? A 5% pay cut with 10% inflation. So that’s no good.

    Narration: The Real News Network spoke to UCU members at picket lines across London. 

    Ewan Mcgaughey (Reader in Law at King’s College London): We’ve had 25% real-terms pay cuts since 2010 when this Tory government took power. We’ve had pension pay cuts of 30%, often more for younger staff.

    Protester: “Wages!”

    “Rising!”

    “Wages!”

    “Rising!” 

    “Pensions?”

    “Rising!”

    They are actually dropping. 

    We want them to be rising! 

    Ewan Mcgaughey (Reader in Law at King’s College London): In 2010, home students paid about £3,000 per year to go and study and since then it’s tripled for home student fees, and yet investment in teaching, you know, teachers’ pay, has been going down. 

    For international students it’s more than doubled. So international students will be paying about £25,000 for an undergraduate degree. It’s absolutely extortionate.

    Protester: We’re going to be talking about protest music this morning.

    Shakuntala Banaji (Professor of media culture at LSE): Well, I’ve been seeing over the last ten years, but even more than that, probably, a real-time cut in people’s pay and that might sound like an academic statistic to some people, but what it means for many of my colleagues is that they are not able to live in London. They have commutes of over 2 hours.

    Many of my students have to make decisions about whether they eat lunch or dinner, and they also have other things competing for their time with trying to do their master’s or doctorate degrees, which means that because the pay for graduate teachers is so low they are working two or three jobs now just to try to stay afloat.

    Dan Brown (PhD student): Everything’s being cut in the name of profit, like in the name of the university making a lot of money but cutting basic services for students, like mental health. They have a lot of money to build these buildings, but they don’t, they don’t want to invest that money In to properly paying staff and having enough staff in, I don’t know, even some basic services for students.

    So it’s really just trashing the whole ability to produce a good education, right? 

    Shakuntala Banaji (Professor of media culture at LSE): So I’ve seen a massive deterioration in the mental health of my colleagues and students over the last ten years and that’s just one of the reasons that I’m on strike today.

    Another one is clearly the massive gaps between particular types of workers in the university and many students and many members of the public probably don’t even know that people are being taught by someone who’s getting paid something close to £10 an hour. Even though they’re told they’re getting £25 an hour, it works out with preparation and marking that they’re getting under a minimum wage at some points.

    Protester: “Solidarity forever for the union makes us strong”

    Ewan Mcgaughey (Reader in Law at King’s College London): Well, yeah, I mean, workloads have been going up, particularly since COVID, so the numbers of students were raised quite a lot through the pandemic. Universities thought that they were going to have cash flow problems so they increased the number of people who came into universities but they didn’t have a corresponding increase in the number of staff, so that means that people are teaching more students in classes -not in itself a bad thing- but when you’ve got the same number of colleagues, it’s going to mean extra essays to mark, it’s going to mean extra exams, extra pastoral care and time that you’ve got to spend with more students.

    So I want to see everybody going to university as much as possible.

    Everyone who wants to should be able to have a good higher education free at the point of use, but we need to fund it properly. We need to make sure that the jobs are there too; make sure that everybody gets an education without burning everyone out. 

    Protester: “What do we want?” 

    “Fair pay!”

    “When do we want it?”

    “Now!”

    “What do we want?”

    “Fair pay!”

    “When do we want it?”

    “Now!”

    Devika Dutt (Lecturer in Development Economics): There’s so many- I know the statistic- that there’s a lot of people who are seeking, amongst faculty, who are seeking mental health services because they’re so burnt out, because they’re so over worked. 

    Now, that is really an unsustainable and inhuman condition to really be working in. And, you know, what we’re trying to do is teach students, is create knowledge, and it’s very hard to do that in these conditions.

    In general, as we know, there’s a cost of living crisis we are in and  people are struggling to make ends meet. That includes university lecturers, and it’s more acute for people who are not white, people who are not men, and people who have disabilities. 

    And so, knowing all of that, and knowing that we have a huge workload, I really want to do my job well but unfortunately our workloads don’t allow many of us, including me, to devote the time that we would like to to do our job really well, to teach students really well, do our research really well. 

    Narration: Amongst dozens of other labour struggles happening in the UK right now this is the latest one to test the government.  

    In a country that is suffering from inflation and the realities of Brexit things are not looking so great in Great Britain.

    Shakuntala Banaji (Professor of media culture at LSE): I think if we do get our demands met, it’s absolutely not enough to say for people to say, okay, I’ve got a wage rise, we’ve got more security in our sector- we need to just go back to being complacent.

    What got us into this in the first place was ignoring the matters of other people’s rights.

    So I think if we don’t do a lot more than just struggling for wage justice, if we don’t think about the human rights of people who are dying crossing the channel people who are suffering now because of the earthquake in Turkey and Syria, I think we are going to end up being a very insular, very fragmented and completely undemocratic nation.

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  • The far-right have increased their anti-refugee activity – but what of the left’s response?

    The far-right mobilised at least five anti-refugee protests in the past week. Fortunately, they were met by anti-fascist resistance at most of them. However, one of the demonstrations clearly showed the tactics that groups like Patriotic Alternative use to infiltrate local communities. It also served as a lesson in what anti-fascists should not be doing.

    The far-right: posing as “locals”?

    As the Canary previously reported, on Saturday 25 February far-right anti-refugee protests took place in Newquay and Skegness. Now, fascists have upped the ante.

    On Monday 27 February, an anti-refugee demo took place in Kegworth, Leicestershire. Here, the Home Office is housing refugees in a local hotel. The media reported that a local resident organised this demo. However, left-wing groups disputed the claim on social media, with some saying the far-right had organised it:

    However, other groups said the far-right infiltrated the protest:

    Anti-racism protesters came out and were trying to persuade any local residents to think again about their opinions:

    The far-right also gathered on Friday 3 March in Bangor, in the North of Ireland:

    Then come the weekend, at least two far-right protests took place on Saturday 4 March. One was in Dover, where around 100 fascists came out, but they were countered by anti-fascists:

    Predictably, some on the far-right were claiming the protest was organised by “residents”. But a quick scan of social media shows this wasn’t the case – with far-right groups from Portsmouth and as far away as Yorkshire represented. Images online show some of the fascists doing Nazi salutes after the protest. However, anti-fascists mobilised well, with various groups like Stand Up To Racism, Care 4 Calais, and Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL) coming out.

    It was a similar story in Carlisle on 4 March. The organised far-right were out protesting about refugees, while claiming it was locals marching – and anti-fascists were there to stand up to them:

    Infiltrating communities and exploiting racist sentiment

    Then, on Sunday 5 March, fascist group Patriotic Alternative mobilised in Erskine, Scotland. Again, the protest was about the Home Office housing refugees in hotels. As the Morning Star reported, the group was:

    led on the site by the ex-British National Party activist Simon Crane, [and] were accompanied by a handful of local residents after it characterised the refugees in the hotel as “200 fight-age men” on social media.

    What the Morning Star crucially noted, though, was just how groups like Patriotic Alternative infiltrate local protests and feed racist sentiment:

    Local residents on both sides began a dialogue about their mutual concerns during the gatherings, discussing worries about local housing, education and service provision.

    As dialogue broke out, it was interrupted and shouted over by PA members… PA activists began to make their way to their cars when the meeting in the middle took place.

    The point being that this age-old tactic from the far-right doesn’t change – except in the age of social media, fascists have another platform to promote their agendas. The far-right exploits the fact that the UK is inherently racist and colonialist, in an attempt to turn protests into violence.

    Refugees welcome – but the left must involve themselves in communities, too

    Meanwhile, anti-racists are trying to build constructive dialogues with locals:

    This is not the end of the far-right marches either. One is happening in Staffordshire on Saturday 11 March, with a counter-protest set to take place:

    Fascists also have trans people in their sights on 11 March. Another anti-Drag Queen Story Time protest will be countered by anti-fascists:

    Getting on the streets and opposing the far-right is crucial, wherever they mobilise in the UK. However, it is also important that left-wing activists don’t just bus themselves in, wave some placards, and then walk away again. There needs to be engagement with local communities at the grassroots.

    Local residents need to see that there’s an alternative to the fascist rhetoric of groups like Patriotic Alternative. This will only happen if anti-racists involve themselves in local communities. Otherwise, busloads of left-wingers descending on communities is hardly likely to create lasting change – and will only end up weakening anti-fascist arguments.

    Featured image via Stand Up To Racism – screengrab

    By Steve Topple

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • MPs and lords blast anti-strikes bill for breaching ‘human rights obligations’

    The Tories’ anti-strikes bill has drawn significant criticism since its inception. The Trades Union Congress (TUC) has called it “draconian” and “spiteful” and says the government must ‘junk’ it. Now, the Joint Committee on Human Rights (JCHR) has said that the new anti-strikes laws are “not justified and need to be reconsidered”.

    Anti-strikes bill: failing human rights

    The new law is officially titled the ‘Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill‘. It would seriously restrict workers’ right to take strike action. Among its critics are European trade unions. They have argued that the legislation would ‘drag the UK further away from democratic norms’. Now, the JCHR, a parliamentary committee made up of MPs and lords, has also slammed the bill “for failing to meet human rights obligations”.

    Its report says the government has failed to provide “sufficient evidence” for introducing the bill. The JCHR warns the new powers being given to ministers are not “proportionate”. It also noted that the bill was incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). However, the Tories are trying to pull the UK out of the ECHR.

    According to the Mirror, the committee said:

    In our view, they may amount to a disproportionate interference with Article 11 [of the ECHR], particularly in circumstances where the strike does not involve essential services and risks to life and limb.

    The Government should reconsider whether less severe measures, such as loss of pay or suspension from work for employees who fail to comply with work notices, could be effective.

    The JCHR’s intervention comes three days after the House of Lords Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee criticised the anti-strikes bill. The committee slammed the bill for giving blanket powers to ministers – while providing virtually no detail.

    Civil liberties groups have also warned that the bill would allow “a further significant and unjustified intrusion by the state into the freedom of association and assembly”. Among the groups to speak out were Liberty, Human Rights Watch, and Oxfam.

    The Tories’ ‘draconian’ law

    In response to the JCHR report, TUC general secretary Paul Nowak said:

    MPs, Lords and civil liberties groups are queuing up to condemn this draconian Bill. These spiteful new laws are an affront to human rights and are a deliberate attempt to restrict the right to strike – a fundamental British liberty.

    The government is steamrolling through parliament legislation that will give ministers sweeping new powers to sack workers who take action to win better pay and conditions. The Conservatives are trying to keep people in the dark. But make no mistake – this Bill is undemocratic, unworkable and almost certainly illegal. And crucially it will likely poison industrial relations and exacerbate disputes rather than help resolve them.

    This nasty Bill should be junked immediately.

    It’s unlikely that the Tories will pay much attention to the JCHR, given they want to drag the UK out of the ECHR anyway. So, it’s up to trade unions, opposition MPs, and campaigners to continue to oppose this authoritarian piece of legislation.

    Featured image via Alarichall – Wikimedia, resized to 770×403 under licence CC BY-SA 4.0

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Muslims in Europe are ‘checking the label’ to avoid supporting apartheid

    In the runup to Ramadan, Muslims are being encouraged to #CheckTheLabel. It’s a movement which aims to ensure that money spent by Muslims this Ramadan does not go towards supporting Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians.

    A message to #CheckTheLabel

    The Palestinian campaign group Friends of Al-Aqsa (FOA) has launched the initiative. As part of the announcement, Shamiul Joarder of FOA said:

    By choosing not to buy Israeli dates this Ramadan the Muslim community can send a clear and powerful message of condemnation of Israel’s illegal occupation and apartheid in Palestine

    In a press release sent out by the group, it noted that:

    Israel is the world’s largest producer of Medjoul dates, with 50% of Israel’s dates exported to Europe. These dates are then sold in major supermarkets as well as local shops across the continent.

    The press release went on to say:

    So far in 2023 Israel has killed at least 62 Palestinians including 13 children – the equivalent of 1 child every 5 days. The Israeli government is increasing home demolitions at an alarming rate and has promised to expand illegal settlements at an unprecedented level. The world’s leading human rights organisations (Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch) have said that Israel is committing the crime of apartheid, but European states are failing to impose sanctions on Israel and uphold international law.

    Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions

    Joarder added:

    It’s time to renew our commitment to BDS this Ramadan.

    BDS stands for ‘Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions’. According to the BDS website, it’s a movement which works:

    to end international support for Israel’s oppression of Palestinians and pressure Israel to comply with international law.

    The Canary has reported extensively on BDS, as well as its successes and challenges. Among those challenges are political attempts to put an end to the movement despite its peaceful and legal actions. So, #CheckTheLabel is another forward move in the ongoing BDS campaign. Joarder added:

    We must remember that as a community we are powerful – we can make our voices heard through the simple act of putting Israeli dates back on the shelf. All we need to do is #CheckTheLabel and not buy dates from apartheid Israel.

    A day of action to encourage Muslims to #CheckTheLabel has been called at UK mosques on 17 March, the last Friday before Ramadan. There will also be an online awareness drive on the final weekend before the holy month. You can visit the FOA website to learn more about the importance of checking the label the next time you shop.

    Featured image via Twitter – Friends of Al Aqsa

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Trans women prisoners policy update bars nearly all from the female estate – but that was already the case

    Content warning: This article contains discussion of genitals and sexual assault.

    On 25 January, the government announced an update to its transgender prisoners policy. Under the new rules, trans women who have “male genitalia” or who have been convicted of a sexual offence will no longer be held in women’s prisons. This follows plans announced on 4 October of last year by former justice secretary Brandon Lewis.

    So what, exactly, is going to change? Currently, there are 230 trans prisoners being held in England and Wales. Of these, 168 are trans women, 42 are trans men, 13 are non-binary, and a further seven did not specify. This is from a total population of 79,800 prisoners.

    Before January’s update, however, it was by no means the case that trans women were sent to the female estate as a matter of course. Individual trans prisoners were assessed for risk – both to and from other prisoners.

    As things currently stand, there are six trans women housed in the women’s estate. It’s regarding these six women, and the potential for others like them, that the government has felt the need to update its policy wholesale.

    The implicit assumption is that a trans woman in possession of a penis is a danger to cis women. However, this does not line up with current statistics. Of the six trans women in the women’s estate, precisely none had committed sexual assaults in prison. According to prisons minister Damian Hinds:

    Since the 2019 strengthening of our policy there have been no assaults or sexual assaults committed by transgender women in women’s prisons and last year we further strengthened that policy.

    Typical reporting

    The Guardian saw fit to report the policy changes with the headline:

    Trans violent offenders banned from women’s prisons in England and Wales

    But there’s a conflation going on here, both in the reporting and in the policy itself. The other group of trans women the announcement affects squeaks in on the subheader:

    New rules also cover transgender women ‘with their male genitalia intact’, says Dominic Raab

    The choice in this framing is indicative of the level of the discussion here. “Trans violent offenders are banned” is the headline, while ‘and nearly all the rest, too’ slips in in smaller print.

    For trans people living in the UK, this will be quite familiar. The fact of having a penis is treated as synonymous with the threat of sexual assault. The very worst that trans people can be is routinely placed at the front of peoples’ minds. This makes it acceptable to do whatever the public pleases to all trans people.

    Falling figures

    According to 2022 polling by research group More in Common, 46% of Britons believe that trans women are women. This is compared to 32% who disagree, with the rest being unsure. However, this belief is conditional – but any trans person could tell you that.

    That 46% who deign to recognise this basic fact of who trans women are, drops as soon as they are asked whether trans people should be granted rights according to their gender. For example, 39% of people believe that trans women should be able to access women’s domestic violence services when they are raped.

    38% of the public think trans women should be able to socially and legally change their genders. The difference between those two figures is 8%. The 8% believe trans women are women until they wish to marry, or die – then they become men, or something else. A similar 38% believe trans women should be able to use women’s toilets. So, another 8% believe trans women are women up until they need to piss outside their homes. Then they become men again.

    The number falls again when considering where the public believes trans women should be imprisoned. Just 24% of Britons believe that a trans woman convicted of a non-violent, non-sexual crime should be sent to the women’s estate. To clarify, that means that 22% of people believe that trans women are women, but they should be locked up in prisons with men anyway. They are women provided that they do not steal, take no illicit drugs, and pay their taxes.

    Well-behaved women

    All of this is to say that, in the public imagining, the trans woman is a special kind of woman. She is a conditional woman. She is a woman provided she remains unnoticed and unobtrusive. Trans women are women until they’re a bit too loud. They’re women until they take up space. Provided that they shrink themselves, that they behave, they are permitted their gender.

    For a cis person, gender is inalienable; it can’t be taken away. For trans people, however, this fundamental aspect of humanity is treated as a reward for compliance.

    The new prisons policy changes little in reality; there are vanishingly few trans women in the female estate already. What it does do, however, is deepen the conflation of trans women’s genitals with the threat of sexual assault in the public consciousness. It exacerbates a manufactured culture war against trans people during a time of increasing violence against LGBTQ+ people.

    Most of all, it confirms a fundamental truth of Britain’s tolerance of transness. Trans people can have their gender, provided that doesn’t have to mean anything at all.

    Featured image via Unsplash/Jonny Gios

    By Alex/Rose Cocker

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • The courts have now handed over a hundred years in prison to the rebels of Bridewell

    Bristol Crown court has sentenced two more people to prison this week, for charges arising out of the city’s 2021 Kill the Bill demonstrations.

    Judge Patrick handed Jesse Geaney 12 months in prison on Monday 27 February for allegedly shining a laser pen towards a police helicopter at a Kill the Bill protest on 26 March 2021. He also sentenced Carl Davis to two and a half years for ‘riot’, for his role in the 21 March uprising outside Bridewell police station.

    Supporters held a demonstration outside the court on 28 February, in support of the defendants.

    Notorious sentencing

    Judge Patrick has presided over almost all of the Kill the Bill trials since March 2021. He has become notorious for handing down harsh sentences. In fact, 34 of Bristol’s Kill the Bill demonstrators have now received a total of over a hundred years in prison between them.

    The 2021 Kill the Bill protest was against the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts (PCSC) Act (then a Bill), and came in the wake of the murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer. The mood was angry and defiant. And when police used shields and batons to attack the crowd, the protesters had had enough. People fought back – seizing police batons, shields, and helmets. Demonstrators breached the windows of the police station, and set several police vehicles on fire.

    Carl Davis was allegedly one of a crowd of people who kicked at the windows of Bridewell police station. The reinforced glass frontage eventually buckled and broke, as demonstrators attacked it with rocks, a skateboard, a bicycle, and reappropriated police batons.

    Before the sentencing on 28 February, Carl wrote this statement:

    Guess I’m off to Butlins to take one for the team! Plead guilty for riot as the evidence seemed too strong for trial. Ironically one of the main pieces of evidence was traces of my blood that in fact came from an injury caused by riot police which is a classic example of what really happened that day…

    I don’t even like to consider it as a riot when in my eyes it was just a peaceful protest against an inhumane bill that was turned violent by the police who broke countless laws and then lied to the media about getting injuries. All we did was defend each other and show the world that if the people who enforce the laws won’t abide by them then neither will we.

    Imprisoned for shining a laser pen

    On 27 February, Jesse Geaney was imprisoned for 12 months for allegedly shining a laser pen at a police helicopter. Jesse had been part of one of the Kill the Bill protests which followed the Bridewell uprising.

    On the Tuesday two days after the clash at Bridewell, a vigil was held on Bristol’s College Green in support of the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller (GRT) community, who the PCSC Bill directly targeted. The cops were out for revenge. Hundreds of riot police attacked the vigil, bringing down their riot shields as weapons on the heads of protesters. The police violence set the scene for at least 10 more demonstrations, which saw intense physical force from riot cops, as crowds fought back.

    Police arrested Jesse after the third mass Kill the Bill demonstration, the following Friday 26 March. Riot cops – many of them on horseback – had been viciously attacking the crowd. Jesse was arrested after police claimed that the laser pen had forced their helicopter to change its flight path.The Tory government has passed legislation specifically against the use of laser pens to disrupt aircraft and other vehicles in recent years.

    Defence barrister Margot Munro-Kerr said that her client had a rare health condition called Marfans syndrome. This would make Jesse’s stay in prison more difficult. She explained that the prison was unable to provide Jesse with adequate care. However, Judge Patrick chose to impose a custodial sentence anyway.

    ‘Harsh and brutal’ sentencing

    Justice for Bristol Protesters (JBP) told The Canary that their members were “heartbroken” at the “callous and inequitable” sentences. JBP is a campaign made up of friends, families, and supporters of the defendants. One parent said:

    The prison sentences handed down this week have been harsh and brutal. The judge chose to totally disregard probation reports and their recommendations, which begs the question of why spend public money producing them.

    They emphasised the toll the sentences were taking on the defendants’ mental health. They also said that the agonising wait for trial is already comparable to serving a prison sentence:

    Given that these cases have taken the best part of two years to come to court and the devastating impact this has had on the mental health of the defendants and their families they have already served a sentence.
    These cases need to be reviewed and a full enquiry undertaken.

    Two years of state repression

    As we approach the second anniversary of the Bridewell uprising, the state’s repressive response is nowhere near over. The Kill the Bill trials are set to carry on at least until this summer. 34 people have already received custodial sentences, and many more are awaiting trial.

    In many ways, what’s happening in Bristol is a microcosm of what’s happening across the UK, as well as on a global scale. Here in the UK, the state is handing out more and more prison sentences to those who resist. On an international scale, states routinely act to stamp out rebellion wherever peoples’ anger spills out onto the streets. Local struggles like the one in Bristol are just one part of the global struggle of people against power. Perhaps we can take solace in the thought that when we suffer state crackdowns we are not alone. Countless others are experiencing the same struggle, and that state repression will only make people fight harder.

    Click here to donate to the Kill the Bill prisoners’ support fund.

    Featured images via Bristol Anti Repression Campaign and Carl Davis (with permission)

    By Tom Anderson

  • When the price on a child’s head is £100k, no wonder adoption in the UK is so toxic

    This is the final article in a three-part series looking at adoption in the UK in relation to mothers and caregivers. Part one, which you can read here, looked at how forced adoption is not a thing of the past – with high numbers of children forcibly removed from mothers by social services. Part two, which you can read here, looked at how systemic racism and ableism pervades the misogynistic UK adoption industry. 

    Adoption in the UK is an industry where children are worth huge sums of money to private companies. The state-sanctioned services who carry out adoptions run on racism, ableism, classism, and misogyny. More specifically, the tactics agencies use to forcibly remove children from chronically ill and disabled mothers are some of the most despicable imaginable. Meanwhile, the private companies running the industry are making tens of millions in profit. So, what price for a mother and child?

    Allegations of fabricating illness

    When a mother is chronically ill or disabled, her experience in family courts regarding residency of her child/children, or adoption, is often laced with prejudice, ableism, and misogyny. Tracey from campaign group Disabled Mothers’ Rights Campaign told the Canary:

    Disabled mothers in family court face multiple prejudices. For example, 70% of learning disabled parents have their children removed, even for mild issues. In other cases, disabled mothers and disabled expectant mothers are disproportionately investigated by social services – with their children being removed.

    Disabled mothers with invisible disabilities such as myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) and Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS), as well as autistic mothers, are disproportionately likely to have their children removed – despite their children often having the same condition. Social services blame the children’s ill-health on their mothers, who are wrongly accused of harming their child by projecting their own disability onto their children (Fabricated or Induced Illness, FII).

    FII is an under-researched area, but what few statistics there are back Tracey’s assertion up. The majority of accusations of FII are false. Further to this, social services also use the potential for future harm as a reason to forcibly remove children from mothers.

    The ‘possibility of future harm’

    Journalist Cherry Casey spoke to Lisa from Disabled Mothers’ Right Campaign for Prospect, noting she:

    had her daughter adopted against her will in 2005… Lisa knew she needed support, in her case due to complex needs including mental health issues and physical problems which meant she depended on crutches. She argues that while her mental health was a focal point during assessments of her parenting, her physical health, and the support she needed to cope, were never properly considered.

    After several assessment centres – one where she was advised not to use crutches, later leading to a bad fall – her daughter was eventually placed for adoption aged two-and-a-half. Later, after Lisa was diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, she was able to open an out-of-time appeal. “I was diagnosed using the symptoms I had been complaining about [throughout her various assessments]… and it was ruled that social services had acted improperly by not taking my physical needs into account and that if [they had] I may have been able to retain custody.”

    The adoption, she adds, was not based on evidence that her daughter had come to harm while in her care, “but the possibility of some form of future mental, physical or emotional harm.”

    As Tracey told the Canary, the state will also argue that the child’s future wellbeing as an adult is a reason to remove them from their mothers:

    It is assumed that when a child whose mother is disabled grows up, they will inevitably become their mothers’ carer. However, if mothers were given their rights under the Care Act, a child would never need to become a carer. The fact is that it costs money to provide care in the community for disabled mothers and their children. After 12 years of austerity the money councils pay for support in the community has been reduced by 50% – whilst the money for forced removals has increased.

    All this means social services and the state are systematically targeting Black, brown, and chronically ill and disabled women. It’s little wonder, though, given that care and adoption sectors are booming industries.

    Feeding an industry to the detriment of mothers and kids

    Tracy also told the Canary:

    Millions are being spent on privatised children’s homes, fostering, and adoption. When a child is taken from their disabled mother and adopted, the financial obligation councils have under the Care Act to support mothers ceases. In short, they make a financial saving.

    Private companies now dominate the landscape of children’s care. 80% of children’s homes are privately-run, and one in three children are fostered through a private agency. As the Guardian reported, private providers charge councils on average over £3,800 per child, per week for care accommodation. Meanwhile, fostering agencies charge on average £820 per child, per week. These industries turn profit margins of 23% and 19% respectively. Some of the largest companies are even owned by private equity firms.

    The Transparency Project and journalist Martin Barrow investigated the adoption and care industry in the UK. They found that:

    One of the largest [providers of children’s care homes] is CareTech, a company listed on the London Stock Exchange with a value of around £600 million. It pays dividends and buys up other providers in the sector, notably Cambian. Its senior directors are each paid £1 million a year, like directors of other listed companies. CareTech’s business has boomed during the pandemic; last year it was paid almost £430 million by local authorities and its profits rose 20 per cent to £60 million. The company uses a number of different names – Branas Isaf, Park Foster Care, TLC, ROC – capitalising on the ‘local’ credentials of the many former family-run businesses it has acquired over the years.

    The smell of easy money has attracted an even more voracious business model: most of CareTech’s biggest competitors are private equity firms. These are mostly private partnerships based offshore in tax havens like Jersey and Luxembourg. You won’t find it on their websites but companies we know as National Fostering Agency, Polaris and Outcomes First are all owned by private equity firms such as Stirling Square Capital Partners, CapVest and August Equity.

    This monopoly exacerbates already existing social inequalities:

    It is increasingly common for one provider to have interests across all children’s service, from early intervention programmes through foster care, children’s homes, residential schools and mental health care. A child may bounce through the system, frequently changing homes and schools, based n decisions influenced by a provider with a financial interest in each move.

    In the end, it seems the only people benefitting from adoption now are private companies and their shareholders.

    Adoption: snatching children away from their mothers

    Adoption in the UK is little more than a wholesale marketplace for children. It’s easy to see why those controlling it target marginalised children. When the price tag on a child’s head is £100,000, private companies will want the ones that either get them the easiest sales (dual heritage children) or easiest wins (children of chronically ill and disabled mothers who don’t always have the capacity to fight). Social services, medical professionals, and courts are complicit in this. They do the bidding of these private child snatchers without a thought for the impact on mothers and their kids.

    It’s a damning indictment of state agencies, particularly largely inept social services, that forced adoption of children is so rampant. However, anyone with lived experience of social services knows they are invariably judgmental, classist, and not fit to be doing their jobs. Moreover, it’s utterly negligent of local councils who allow this to continue. Despite their protestations of funding cuts, they still have the power to control what their agencies are doing. At the same time, central government is also to blame for allowing the adoption industry to flourish in this toxic way.

    However, the broader picture here is that we as a society allow this to go on. Adoption services serve as a mirror of the UK’s own prejudices of misogyny, racism, ableism, and classism. We live in a society where marginalised mothers are expendable. The state tells us (and we believe it) that their children are ‘better off without them’; that these kids will flourish with their new middle-class families, and that it’s the mother’s fault that they’re in this position in the first place. All of this is categorically untrue – yet this most evil of state-sanctioned industries continues.

    Barely any attempt is made to keep children with their mothers, or to assist mothers with care plans and support. Ultimately, it shows the contempt that the government, adoption agencies, and society more broadly have for marginalised women.

    Featured image via Disabled Mothers’ Right Campaign 

    By Steve Topple

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • ‘It’s amazing how many people are united at the moment’: UK teachers join strike wave

    The strikes in Britain are growing and this time it’s the teachers who have come out in force, demanding better wages amongst the cost of living crisis. On Feb. 1 up to 500,000 workers walked out in the UK, in one of the largest coordinated strike actions since the pensions dispute of 2011. It was a cross-union action which also saw train drivers going on strike as well as thousands of the government’s own civil servants. The teachers are refusing to back down in their demands and have promised further strike action and disruption in the coming months. TRNN heads to a protest in central London and speaks directly with the striking teachers, pupils, and other unions who have come out in support of the action. This video is part of a special Workers of the World series on the cost of living crisis in Europe.

    Producer, videographer, and video editor: Ross Domoney

    This story, with the support of the Bertha Foundation, is part of The Real News Network’s Workers of the World series, telling the stories of workers around the globe building collective power and redefining the future of work on their own terms.

    Transcript

    Narration: The strikes in the UK are growing.

    Melissa Costello (School teacher): It’s just going to get to the point now, isn’t it, when everything is shut down because everybody has had enough.

    Richard Christopher Brown (Sixth form teacher of politics): Well, I think it feels like things don’t work anymore.

    Narration: On February 1st, up to half a million teachers, civil servants, and train drivers walked out over pay. 

    Simon Weller (Assistant Secretary of ASLEF, UK train union): [Rishi] Sunak you are out of your depth. You’re going to have to come and talk to us, and you’re going to have to come up with the goods.

    Narration: It was the largest coordinated strike action for over a decade.

    Masuma Bari (Secondary English teacher): I mean, if we were being listened to, I wouldn’t be on strike today, I’d be in my classroom right now teaching my year elevens that have got their GCSEs coming up.

    Protesters: Teacher burnout it’s why we have this turn out! 

    Narration: This time, it’s the teachers leading the walkout in what is becoming a battle for dignity and better wages.

    Masuma Bari (Secondary English teacher): It’s not an easy decision to make because obviously students are at the forefront of our mind when we’re striking. This is for our future.This is a future of children as well. But at the same time, you know what future is that? Is that a future where, you know, they’re underfunded, they can’t pay their own rent, they can’t, you know, afford food.They can’t afford their bills.Then what kind of future is that? There’s lots of students that I think want to get into teaching, and they’re now put off because actually they can physically see the struggle.There’s lots of teachers going to food banks.

    Protesters: No wage losses! Overthrow the bosses! 

    Harry (Pupil): Well teachers have, for me at least, gone above and beyond what they’re supposed to do, and have gone beyond what their pay demands them to do and what their job descriptions demand them to do. So that includes like extracurricular clubs, and just supporting me, and just making sure that emotional needs are met and that kind of thing, because underfunding is a big thing in therapy and other things as well, so teachers really have to do it all.

    Jane Carter (Special educational needs teacher): Well for a start we were just shouting a minute ago about, you know, let’s have a laminator, please. I mean, the funding for just basic things. We find as teachers, we’re always buying things, I mean, the funding for just basic things. We find as teachers, we’re always buying things, because there just isn’t anything there. Basic things that people should just have…you know, stationery and all the rest. But, I mean, a lot of our students need specific equipment, you know, particular resources, because they learn differently. And there just isn’t enough funding to be able to afford all of that.

    Melissa Costello (School teacher): We are now at the point where we’re turning off lights and our TV screens and things. Whether we have issues with our heating… we’re trying to, like, only have heating on during the school day. 

    Masuma Bari (Secondary English teacher): Things that students need, they’re not having it. The facilities have been reduced down massively. 

    Harry (Pupil): In a school I was at before it got shut down because of a lack of funding. I’ve been in lessons sometimes and there’s been not enough glue sticks, not enough scissors. It slows down lessons. 

    Dermot Mullin (Assistant head teacher): I’ve seen too many teachers come into the profession and leave too soon because of funding cuts. They’re underfunded, they’re overworked, and we’re not keeping good people. It’s not going to have the best outcome for the pupils, and we’re here for them.

    Leon Brown (Pupil): I’m Leon Brown and I go to Heartlands High School, and I’m here today so that teachers get more pay and teachers get fair pay. 

    Carla (Head of sociology): So at the moment, even within departments specifically for mine – Social Sciences, there’s not a lot of teachers, they’re all leaving.So anyone who’s left in it is taking on double the amount of work. So hours, technically, it’s all day, every day. I work at home as well, not just at school, to get everything done on time. And then at the end of it, when you look at your pay, it’s not matching up.

    Dermot Mullin (Assistant head teacher): We have such a high turnover of staff, where in the place that I’ve worked for five years, we’ve had an entire new staff team because people are seeing that there’s jobs out there that pay more, that require less working hours, and they’re seeing those opportunities and going for them. And we’ve lost too many good people to it. 

    Narration: The striking teachers in the UK are the latest workforce to hit the streets. Their picket lines are supported by other unions, as new battle lines are drawn.

    Will Searby (Acorn Union): This is one of the first, one of the biggest rounds, of coordinated strike action since the Pensions Dispute in 2011. 

    Masuma Bari (Secondary English teacher): It’s incredible, to be honest with you, I think it’s amazing how many people are united at the moment. But actually what’s sad is that there’s so many people out on the streets striking, day in, day out. It’s telling us that actually it’s not just the education sector that’s not being heard, but the transport sector, you know, even the government’s own civil service want to go on strike.

    Chris Marks (Public and commercial services union): Yeah so, I’m a member of the Public and Commercial Services Union. We are a union that represents just shy of 200,000 civil servants and workers that are involved in government contracts. Now the fire fighters are in the frame and we hope that more unions will be joining us soon. Now is the time for escalation.

    Simon Weller (Assistant Secretary of ASLEF, UK train union): Yeah, [un]usually, as a rail worker, we don’t tend to get a lot of public support, but this time round there has been real widespread support for rail workers, for the teachers, for the nurses, because everyone’s in it together.

    Apsana Begum (Labour MP): Since 2010, the devastating effects of austerity on our education system has seen schools be stripped back to the bone.

    Jane Carter (Special educational needs teacher): We went to another school before we came on today. We’re supporting each other, because you can feel quite isolated in your own place. And it’s really important to join up. Schools joining up with other schools, and unions joining up with other unions.

    Narration: But it is the union solidarity, which is scaring the government, whose response is a set of threatening and Draconian laws.

    Carla (Head of sociology): I mean, yes, so the government trying to bring in anti-strike laws is just shocking. And I think, again, it goes against every single thing that they should be doing as a democracy. But when you look from the outside, look at the country and think about that, what they stand for, how does that make any sense whatsoever?

    Narration: In an atmosphere of uncertainty, and with inflation set to rise, many strikers are defiant and willing to go further until their demands are met. 

    Dermot Mullin (Assistant head teacher): I think it’s about perseverance. I think that the strikes are going to need to continue. That, you know, we’ve got three strikes planned again for next month. That’s going to cause a lot of disruption. If it doesn’t change by then, we’re going to have to continue striking. It’s going to come to an ultimatum where they have to make a decision, and it’s about who’s backing down first. And from the spirit of the teaching staff, I don’t think they’re going to be the first ones to do it.

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  • Covid contracts and cronyism: Matt Hancock’s texts make for tough reading

    Matt Hancock‘s WhatsApp messages have leaked. Three years on, we’re getting a fuller picture of what happened in the chaotic early days of the pandemic. That seems to have been PPE (personal protective equipment) contract cronyism, and contempt towards workers. Indeed, teachers were even branded lazy by ministers despite soldiering on through the pandemic.

    The former health secretary was quick to call the leaks a “betrayal”. He had handed over his WhatsApp history to right-wing journalist Isabel Oakeshott, to write his book about the period. Hancock has given the impression there was an undertaking to not share the messages further. But Oakeshott instead appears to have handed them to the Telegraph.

    One of the most damning claims is that Hancock did not take up expert advice on testing and visiting rules for care homes. This may have led to tens of thousands of resident’s deaths. Guidance suggested that everyone entering a care home at the time be tested, something which Hancock appeared to agree with. Yet ultimately he seems to have abandoned that advice, saying:

    I do not think the community commitment adds anything and it muddies the waters

    The cat is truly out of the bag, and its not going back in anytime soon.

    PPE contracts

    It has long been claimed that Tories were handing close associates massive contracts for things like protective equipment and tests. Anger resurfaced on social media following the leaks:

    Indeed, despite his talk of betrayal, Hancock wasn’t inspiring much emotion aside from anger. One Twitter user made the point that Hancock wasn’t the only Tory who may have benefitted:

    Nobody seemed to be letting Oakeshott off the hook – one person branded her a “despicable hypocrite”. But there was a recognition that Hancock was in a position of enormous power during the pandemic, and deserved criticism:

    Unions

    Ministers also attacked teachers for their conduct during the pandemic. WhatsApp conversations between Hancock and then-education secretary Gavin Williamson reveal their contempt for teachers.

    In one exchange following an announcement that A levels would be delayed, Williamson told Hancock:

    Cracking announcement today. What a bunch of absolute arses the teaching unions are

    Hancock replied:

    I know they really really do just hate work

    Naturally, this went down like a lead balloon with those who sympathise with teachers:

    The National Education union (NEU) blasted Williamson:

    Evidence that could have curbed the impact of Covid, resulting in wider lockdowns, was ignored, and they gave consistently late information to headteachers on the latest measures being imposed by government on schools and colleges. It was nothing short of a shambles

    Further, its joint general secretary Mary Bousted tweeted:

    Care homes

    The leaks re-energised criticism about Hancock’s approach to care homes during the pandemic. Palliative care doctor Rachel Clark branded Hancock a charlatan for his conduct during the pandemic:

    Meanwhile, another campaigner called for Boris Johnson and Hancock to be charged over the deaths of tens of thousands of elderly people:

    On top of that, activist David Challen pointed out that for all his talk about betrayal, Hancock couldn’t even begin to understand what it meant compared to the families of the pandemic dead:

    Justice?

    It remains to be seen if the new leaks will lead to any serious action. A public inquiry would be a start, though actual charges would be a miracle. However, the likes of Hancock must never be let off the hook for the contempt they showed for ordinary people during the pandemic.

    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/DHSC, cropped to 770 x 403, licenced under Open Government Licence.

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Systemic racism and ableism pervades the misogynistic UK adoption industry

    This is the second in a three-part series looking at adoption in the UK in relation to mothers and caregivers. Part one, which you can read here, looked at how forced adoption is not a thing of the past – with high numbers of children forcibly removed from mothers by social services. 

    The issue of forced adoptions is one that bubbles under the surface in society and is often not recognised when discussing children’s care and social services. However, for the mothers’ affected by it, and those who live in fear of it, social services snatching your child away is a very real and present danger. That’s because agencies are targeting marginalised women and children when it comes to adoption.

    Systemic racism in adoption

    Support not Separation is a coalition of organisations. It fights for the rights of mothers and children against social services and other government agencies. As the Canary wrote in part one of this series, in 2019 the group conducted research into mothers caught-up in family court cases.

    Predictably, nearly half of the women Support not Separation surveyed were Black or brown. The issue of forced separations and adoptions is often driven by both the state’s systemic misogyny, but crucially racism. The latter is particularly rife, with the government’s own figures backing this up. They show, for example, that the percentage of children in care who are dual heritage is double the population rate (10% versus 5%). Therefore, the state is disproportionately separating these children from their mothers. Also, since 2015, the number of white children the state has forcibly removed from their mothers has fallen. Meanwhile, the number of dual heritage children has risen.

    The organisation Adoptee Futures brings together adult adoptees, supporting them in healing from their experiences. It is also working to “reclaim the adoption narrative” from the current, toxic one. Annalisa S. Toccara is the group’s co-founder and CEO. She told the Canary:

    We believe racism is institutionalised in the UK adoption sector. Racist attitudes and biases have been engrained in the system for decades, in addition to a lack of diversity and cultural understanding within the industry. The needs of Black children and families are not being met correctly in the family welfare system. As a result, rather than the government adequately providing funding and support for kinship carers, money is being funnelled into the adoption industry, and Black children are being removed from their families of origin and placed into care. This is especially concerning considering the data shows that Black children are overrepresented in the care system and often experience more harm due to being taken from their families and placed in unfamiliar environments.

    Black children make up 5% of the population, but 8% of children in care. The disparity, as Annalisa explains, compounds already existing issues of anti-Blackness that children face. The adoption industry exploits this for its own profit and Annalisa tells us:

    We believe the government should take further action to provide substantial resources for families in crisis. Adoption is equivalent to putting a bandage on an issue rather than addressing the core causes of why children are put into care, including systemic racism, classism, ableism, and colonialism.

    Support not Separation also found in its research that 94% of women were on low incomes, and at least three-quarters were survivors of domestic violence. However, another intersecting yet supposedly “protected” group under the Equality Act 2010 is chronically ill and disabled mothers.

    Do disabled mothers actually have rights?

    Tracey Norton is the coordinator of the Disabled Mothers’ Rights Campaign – part of campaign group WinVisible (Women with Visible and Invisible Disabilities). The group aims to bring “disabled mothers together” to fight against the state taking their children away. The group told the Canary it is fighting to:

    stop the cruelty and discrimination we face from Council social services and the family courts taking our children away.

    It also wants:

    the support from official agencies which we are entitled to by law.

    The Canary spoke with Tracey about the group and its aims. She told us:

    We always make the point that disabled mothers and their children are particularly targeted by social services. This results in children being traumatically removed from their mothers – as disability is seen as harmful to children. Disabled mothers are entitled to support in the community to support both themselves and their children under the Care Act and the Children Act. However, because the family courts are held in secret, the injustice and trauma of forced removals including forced adoptions, just because a mother has a disability, is hidden from public view. There is no accountability for decisions made there.

    Targeting chronically ill and disabled women

    The situation when a chronically ill and/or disabled mother is facing social services or the courts is often harrowing. And, in no uncertain terms, it is laced with prejudice and discrimination. Tracey has experienced it first-hand. She told the Canary:

    I am a mother with an invisible disability. My child has Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS) and we have been directly affected by family court. I fought long and hard to get my child the care he needed in the community. However, when they decided to cut my funding, I fought to keep it – causing them to drag me through family court with false allegations. My own invisible disability was used against me in court. A judge with no medical qualifications was allowed to say that he did not believe the results of my MRI scan and dismissed my issues as a lie. My child was removed and I fought a long battle to get him home.

    Whilst he was in care, he was placed in inappropriate accommodation which was inaccessible for his wheelchair, and with no accessible bathroom. He spent the next two years not having a bath or shower and having no sheets on his bed. He was denied access to medical appointments or appropriate education – and when I finally got him home I had to throw everything out as it was infested with fleas and his hair matted. He spent his time in care living on bread and hummus, and was skin and bones when he returned home to me – having his first home cooked meal in two years.

    Sadly, Tracey’s story is not unusual.

    This journalist knows one mother who was sectioned under the Mental Health Act because social services believed she was lying about her chronic illness (which was also EDS). She then had to pretend she was well to fight a two-year court battle to get custody of her child. I know another mother who lives with enduring psychological distress. She is still in a battle with social services after having her children forcibly removed. Said services lied about her, falsified evidence, breached regulatory guidelines, and – in a situation similar to Tracey’s – put her children in appalling foster care.

    Another mother was also subject to social services forcibly removing her five children. That was until she, too, was diagnosed with a chronic, incurable illness, eventually getting her kids back. This is all just on one council estate in south London. The common factors are that, in all the cases, the children were dual heritage or Black, all the mothers were reliant on social security, and they were all either chronically ill or living with mental health issues.

    For people who are forced to encounter the adoption system, it’s clearly not a system that is working well. The system takes already existing racism, classism, and ableism and focuses that on vulnerable people. None of this can reasonably be considered an accident of the system. Rather, it’s the system working as it’s supposed to.

    Part three in this series will be looking at what the state does to take chronically ill and disabled mothers’ children away from them. It will also look at how adoption has become a for-profit, private industry. 

    Featured image via perpetual.fostering – Wikimedia, resized to 770×403 under licence CC BY 2.0

    By Steve Topple

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • People with ME are dying while politicians do nothing and the NHS stands idly by. Enough.

    The author of this article is a co-founder of the chronic illness campaign group discussed.

    A protest is taking place on Wednesday 8 March at parliament. It is for people living with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) – a chronic systemic neuroimmune disease not dissimilar to long Covid. You can read more about ME and its symptoms here. Medical professionals generally claim there is no known cure for ME. However, currently there are also some high-profile cases of the NHS severely neglecting seriously ill people living with ME. Worse still, three people have already died in recent months. So, with fear and anger among the ME community growing, a campaign group is taking action. We need your support with it.

    The Chronic Collaboration

    Myself and my chronically ill and disabled partner Nicola Jeffery launched the Chronic Collaboration in 2021. It’s a campaign group – check out its Twitter here. As we stated on Twitter, it aims to be:

    A new resistance movement for chronically ill & disabled people. Joining the dots between conditions. Resisting psychologisation. Fighting for justice & equality.

    It’s early days yet. But through lived experience of chronic illness and learned approaches from other types of activism, we aim to change the way our community fights for its rights. First in our sights was the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) delaying the new guidelines on ME.

    In September 2021 we held a protest outside its HQ. NICE eventually backed down, and published the guidelines. They are by no-means perfect – but it was a better result than it could have been. Since then, Nicola has had a prolonged period of severe ill health. However, recent events in the ME and chronic illness communities compelled us to act again.

    Sami and Alice: severe ME

    As I previously reported, Sami Berry is currently dying in an NHS hospital. She lives with severe ME, as well as Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS) and epilepsy. Campaign group ME Action UK said:

    Sami is very concerned she is going into intestinal failure as severe ME and EDS has made her body unable to digest nutrients even through a feeding tube. NHS doctors are refusing to provide her with drugs that previously helped her regain nutritional levels, or refer her to a specialist. She is vomiting repeatedly, and cannot even keep 4ml down. It has been 26 days [at the time of writing] without food. Her blood sugar levels are dangerously low. Sami and her family are requesting that the hospital transfer her care to specialists who understand how to treat severe ME and EDS.

    At the time of writing (Thursday 2 March), I was told that the hospital Sami was at had tried a percutaneous endoscopic jejunostomy (PEJ): a feeding tube inserted directly into the small intestine. However, this had reportedly not worked properly and Sami was still struggling. Her husband Craig said:

    I am slowly watching my wife die in front of my eyes. The doctors at the hospital are refusing to provide her with drugs that previously helped her regain nutritional levels… Her consultant has said that he will not necessarily take the advice of the specialists

    Sadly, Sami is not the only one in this awful situation. As the Times reported:

    Alice Barrett, 25, has severe myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) and is being cared for by Royal Devon University Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust.

    Her father, Mark, said that doctors were ignoring advice from family and ME experts on how best to treat her. “Alice will die. And we haven’t got much time at all,” he warned.

    Barrett is being treated at the same hospital as Maeve Boothby-O’Neill, the daughter of the Times journalist Sean O’Neill, who died of ME two years ago.

    Barrett needs to be fed via a tube, and the hospital has said it is NHS policy that she must be inclined at 30 degrees for this to happen. However, her family say her condition means she cannot tolerate being anything other than horizontal.

    On Wednesday 1 March, I was told the hospital had reportedly agreed to tube-feed Alice at an angle of five degrees. It was unclear at the time of publication whether this had worked. There is a petition in relation to Alice’s situation you can sign here.

    Sami and Alice both being in life-threatening conditions in the NHS at the same time is bad enough. However, their stories emerged against a backdrop of three people with ME having died since Christmas 2022: Anna Fitzgerald-Clark, Kara Jane Spencer, and Sarah Louise Mclure.

    Three demands for ME

    All these women’s stories point to systemic failings within the NHS, which you can read more about here. For example, as I previously wrote, the new NICE guidelines say:

    doctors should refer patients to ME specialist teams. While these do exist in England, they are all varied. Some are led by psychologists like Surrey and Hull; others like the Yorkshire Fatigue Clinic involve immunologists. Moreover, others like in Suffolk have been stopped. So, the idea that people can see specialists is a postcode lottery.

    With people dying, others seriously ill in hospital, and anecdotal reports of the NICE guidelines not being properly followed – as a person with ME, and as the carer of that person, Nicola and I cannot stand by and do nothing. So, the Chronic Collaboration will mobilise again:

    We’ll meet at Old Palace Yard at 12:30pm on 8 March with three demands. At 1pm we’ll hand them to parliament, to be given to the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on ME and the health and social care select committee. Then, at 1:30pm, we’ll walk to the Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) and hand our three demands in there, too. These three demands aim to address the underlying issues with NHS care and support for people living with ME. They are:

    #DontLetMEDie: THREE URGENT DEMANDS: THAT THE APPG ON ME URGENTLY CONVENE A MEETING TO DRAW-UP ADVICE TO MPs ON HOW TO INTERVENE ON BEHALF OF SEVERE ME PATIENTS. THAT THE HEALTH AND SOCIAL CARE SELECT COMMITTEE URGENTLY CONDUCTS AN INQUIRY INTO THE TREATMENT BY THE NHS OF ALL POST-VIRAL ILLNESSES (INCLUDING LONG COVID AND ME/CFS) AND THEIR ASSOCIATED CONDITIONS (FOR EXAMPLE, POTS, GASTROPARESIS, CRANIOCERVICAL INSTABILITY). THAT THE DEPARTMENT FOR HEALTH AND SOCIAL CARE URGENTLY CONDUCTS A REVIEW INTO NHS ENGLAND, HEALTH EDUCATION ENGLAND AND THE GENERAL MEDICAL COUNCIL'S IMPLEMENTATION OF THE NICE GUIDELINES ON ME/CFS - PARTICULARLY REGARDING SEVERE ME.

    We’ll be using #DontLetMEDie on the day. Moreover, what I wrote about the Chronic Collaboration’s NICE protest in September 2021 also applies to its 8 March demo:

    people living with ME and other chronic illnesses often can’t protest in person. If you can’t attend, and someone can’t attend on your behalf, we still want to see you there. Email a picture of yourself to hello(at)thechroniccollaboration.com and we’ll make sure… [parliament] sees your face.

    The community needs allies. This is why we want as many people to support this as possible: from NHS workers to other chronically ill and disabled people via non-disabled campaign groups, MPs, and well-wishers. Chronic illness doesn’t discriminate (even if the system does). With the emergence of long Covid, more and more people are affected. It could be you next – or someone you know and love.

    For this to be effective, it’s crucial that there’s a large social media presence also. We’re asking people to use the three demands poster above and tweet @NHSEngland @DHSHgovuk @gmcuk using #DontLetMEDie (note the capitalisation, it’s crucial) – saying why these organisations need to act. People need to do this from 12:30pm on 8 March. We’ll also be livestreaming the protest on the Chronic Collaboration’s Twitter.

    #DontLetMEDie

    It might seem inexplicable to some that, after NICE’s new guidelines, the NHS would still dangerously neglect people living with ME. However, that is the reality – and from where I’m viewing it, the situation actually seems to have worsened. There needs to be targeted action to bring this to the attention of people who may make change: politicians, civil servants and government. The community needs to look to those that can fight and allies that can support it. So, join us in person or online on Wednesday 8 March. We owe it to each other.

    Featured image via the Chronic Collaboration

    By Steve Topple

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Gove’s plan to have qualifications for social housing managers spits in the face of residents

    Michael Gove has announced that social housing managers will have to study for qualifications. This comes after the death of two-year-old Awaab Ishak due to the mould in his flat. Gove said:

    The Grenfell Tower tragedy and, more recently, the death of Awaab Ishak showed the devastating consequences of residents inexcusably being let down by poor performing landlords who consistently failed to listen to them.

    We know that many social housing residents are not receiving the service or respect they deserve.

    Gove, apparently, is labouring under the delusion that landlords and social housing managers just need to be trained not to kill Black and brown people in their properties.

    Obvious problems

    Several people took to social media to explain the obvious problems with Gove’s ridiculous suggestion. Journalist Lorraine King pointed out the danger of such qualifications, as well as the shocking conditions Awaab died in:

    Unison convenor John Gray said the proposed reforms will do little to fix bad housing:

    MP Diane Abbott blamed government underfunding:

    You might also wonder what else the genius Gove is up to. Well, he’s suggested that parents whose children don’t attend school could have their benefits cut:

    That’s hardly the suggestion of a man sensitive to the outrageous living conditions in social housing. He’s certainly not shown anything to suggest that he might have a compassionate and reasonable outlook on struggling residents and parents. However, let’s lay it out for him anyway.

    Trail of malicious incompetence

    The deadly incompetence that caused Awaab’s death was followed by more bullshit. A post-mortem examination found fungus in the two-year-old’s blood and lungs. A property inspection two days after Awaab’s death found it unfit for human habitation. In spite of this, Rochdale Boroughwide Housing (RBH) – which was responsible for Awaab’s family home – refused to rehouse his family. RBH were accused of racism towards the family both before and after his death.

    Gove brought up the Grenfell fire as another reason that legislation around social housing needs to be changed. Indeed, at the time of Awaab’s death Grenfell United offered their condolences and urged change:

    Gove himself was forced to apologise for the lack of action in the aftermath of Grenfell:

    Again, I want to apologise to the bereaved, to relatives and survivors for the fact that the Government over the last five years has sometimes been too slow in acting… sometimes we have behaved in a way which has been insensitive.

    Gove’s suggestion that social housing managers have to undergo training spits in the face of campaigners who’ve long had to reckon with sub-standard housing and an indifferent government. How will training change the fact that most social housing isn’t fit to live in? How will training change extensive government underfunding? Does Gove intend to train landlords to consider Black and brown people to be humans who have a right to life?

    If anything can be learned from the inaction after Grenfell, it’s that this government doesn’t care about people like Awaab. It won’t fund the housing sector properly. It’s not interested in providing mould-free and safe housing. The government just wants to help landlords make a quick buck. If a few hundred people burn to death, or a toddler dies with fungus in his lungs, so what?

    Featured image by Unsplash/Ben Allan

    By Maryam Jameela

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Activists are having to ask the independent Covid inquiry to include race

    The independent coronavirus (Covid-19) inquiry has been urged to make race a central part of its work. 26 organisations – including the NHS BME (Black and Minority Ethnic) Network, Disability Rights UK, and the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants – have written an open letter. The inquiry is set to hear evidence in June, but is currently determining which issues exactly should be examined.

    Potential scandal from Covid inquiry

    Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice and the Runnymede Trust put the letter together. They’re asking for ethnic minority communities to be at the centre of the inquiry. They state:

    We are concerned by the announcement during the latest hearing of the COVID-19 Inquiry that structural racism will not be explicitly considered in Module 1, despite multiple requests for the Inquiry to interrogate why Black and minority ethnic people contracted and died from COVID-19 at such starkly disproportionate rates.

    The very idea that the inquiry might not consider race as central to its work is scandalous. During the early stages of the pandemic, Black and Asian people had higher rates of death than white people. The British Medical Journal (BMJ) explained that:

     The groups at greatest risk have also changed over time: at the start of the pandemic, covid-19 mortality was highest in the Black African group,1 whereas in subsequent waves it was highest in Bangladeshi and Pakistani groups.2

    In the most recent wave to December 2021, only Pakistani men and Bangladeshi men and women experienced excess mortality compared with the White British group after adjustment for sociodemographic and health factors and vaccination status.

    As more communities are now vaccinated, the latest data from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) shows that the ethnic minority death gap has now closed.

    Inequality writ large

    That said, the initial spikes of disproportionate deaths of ethnic minorities cannot be forgotten. The open letter from campaigners argues that:

    COVID-19 is not just a health crisis; it’s also a social and economic crisis. The ability to cope, to protect and to shield oneself from the virus varies vastly for people from different ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds.

    These inequalities are certainly not new, but instead are amplified by the scale of the ongoing pandemic. Shockingly, the open letter notes that the government appears to have bypassed its responsibility towards ethnic minorities, once again:

    We are disheartened to learn that the Listening Exercise has been outsourced to PR companies with close ties to Government as part of an entirely separate process to the Inquiry itself. Any inquiry must place the voices of those worst affected at its core; we expect the COVID-19 Inquiry to set up accessible consultations directly with minority ethnic communities and their representatives, to listen and then act upon their experiences.

    The fact that the government, even during a Covid inquiry, is turning to private outsourcing is beyond belief. The pandemic was rife with government cronyism – as the Canary‘s Tom Coburg explained:

    The provision of PPE (personal protective equipment) and Coronavirus (Covid-19) related contracts reveal a pattern that suggests, at best, government incompetency and, at worst, cronyism.

    Cronyism is so central to the government that one barrister has reportedly warned it to limit the information it shares with the inquiry.

    Medical racism

    Communities of colour have disproportionately been impacted by Covid. However, that’s not the whole story. It should be obvious for the inquiry to consider the inequalities compounded by Covid. Somehow, though, that’s not a given. On top of that, statistics regularly ignore disabled people of colour. They’re so often left behind by data that when it comes to reviewing health responses they’re barely part of the conversation.

    In an investigation from 2020, the Canary spoke to Sarah Chander, a senior policy advisor at European Digital Rights, who told us:

    In a world of deep, sustained inequalities, our default understanding must be that data, technologies and systems deigned to record, study and classify marginalised communities are flawed. They reflect the power imbalances of today and of history. In such a context, claims of neutrality are also political statements, ones which seek to derail from a more cohesive understanding of structures of oppression and historical imbalances.

    If the Covid inquiry was to have any hope of bringing justice for bereaved families and communities, it would respond on multiple levels. It would listen to the 26 organisations urging it to put race at the centre of its work. Then, it would take the deaths of people of colour from the pandemic seriously. It would incorporate class and poverty analysis into its work with race. Moreover, it would also consider how incomplete data needs to be combined with listening to people of colour about their experiences.

    If the inquiry chooses not to do any of this then people of colour will know everything they need to know about its position on their communities that were severely damaged by the pandemic.

    Featured image by Unsplash/Noah Matteo

    By Maryam Jameela

  • A protest just highlighted how adoption is the state-sanctioned, forcible removal of children from marginalised women

    This is the first in a three-part series looking at adoption in the UK, focusing on marginalised mothers and caregivers. 

    The state’s adoption of children has effectively become an industry in recent years. However, not all mothers and caregivers are subject to social services taking their children from them. This is because the state is disproportionately targeting women the system marginalises – be it due to ethnicity, class, disability, or chronic illness. It shows that systemic racism, ableism and classism pervades a service that is supposed to support children, not snatch them from their mothers. And the driver for all this is private profit.

    Support not Separation

    Support not Separation is a coalition of organisations. It fights for the right of mothers and primary caregivers against social services and courts. Specifically, Support not Separation deals with adoption and forced separation, which is when these institutions attempt to remove children from mothers. It says on its website that:

    We are a coalition of organisations and individuals who have experienced or witnessed the damage caused by the forced separation of children from their mother or other primary carer and are determined to change this desperate situation.

    Once a month, on the first Wednesday, the group protests outside the Central Family Court in London. On 1 March it was there again – as well as holding a “virtual” protest online. Support not Separation specifically focuses on the intersections within adoption – like class and disability:

    The group also highlights the inherent misogyny that exists in the system, and how it ignores domestic violence from men:

    However, crucially, the group also focuses on how the system forces so many adoptions to take place without mothers’ consent:

    Other campaign groups are involved. WinVisible is a group for women living with visible and invisible disabilities. It highlighted that it was the sixth anniversary of the protest:

    At the heart of Support not Separation’s work, though, is the state of adoption services in the UK and how they fail women and children.

    Adoption: a state-run industry

    Adoption in the UK is effectively a state-run industry, with private companies making hundreds of millions in profit. However, all too often adoption is no longer in the child’s best interests. Nor are they adopted with the mother’s explicit consent. It is now driven by profit motives and underscored by racism, prejudice, and classism. It’s unsurprising when the value of a child to these private companies is around £100,000.

    As Cherry Casey wrote for Prospect in October 2022, “forced adoptions are not in the past”:

    The UK is unusual, compared to the rest of Europe, for the frequency of forced adoptions. Exact statistics are difficult to pin down, but data from 2014 suggests that almost half of the 5,050 children adopted in the previous year were given new homes without their parents’ consent. In England alone, 80,000 children were removed from their parents in the year up to March 2021. Of those, 4,600 had a “placement order granted” for their removal. The context behind the removal of the remaining 76,000, is less clear.

    According to Alexandra Conroy Harris, a legal consultant for CoramBAAF… this means the removals “will almost certainly have been made without the consent of the child’s parents.” The 2021 data also shows that of 2,270 children “placed in adoption,” only 290, or 13 per cent, were adopted “with consent”.

    This is not news to Support not Separation. It conducted research in 2021 based on 219 mothers and 411 children involved in family court cases (for example custody battles or fighting against social services). The group said that:

    Over half the mothers had had their children taken from them (a significant increase from 2017). In 30% of cases the children were living with the abusive father; 14% had children in foster care. And 10% had children adopted without their consent. This shocking figure gives lie to the idea that forced adoptions are historic, they are in fact a present-day policy of punishment and social cleansing

    However, behind the figures is the core of the issue: social services are disproportionately targeting marginalised mothers. Within in this pervades a culture dominated by systemic misogyny, racism, ableism and classism.

    Parts two and three in this series will be looking at the intersections of these issues – and how adoptions are driven by companies’ profit motives, not children, and mothers’ and caregivers’ wellbeing. 

    Featured image via the Disabled Mothers’ Rights Campaign

    By Steve Topple

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • What do the RMT and NEU strikes have in common with the UCU? Not a lot, unfortunately.

    Two trade unions have announced further strikes, as a third stages walkouts across England and Wales. These are from the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT), the University and College Union (UCU), and the National Education Union (NEU). However, while two unions’ actions are an escalation, the other’s appears to be trying to cover its own mistakes. It shows that far from being a united movement, trade unions in the UK have a difficult disparity between them.

    RMT: walkouts on the Underground

    The RMT has said that its members on the London Underground will strike on 15 March. As the Canary previously reported, Transport for London (TfL) is attacking tube workers’ pay and conditions. This is because its revenue collapsed during the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic. Then, the Tory government gave it some cash – but the money came with conditions. The RMT says that the government and TfL will force through:

    • 600 job losses.
    • A worsening of the work-life balance for staff, with managers being empowered to make shift changes at the last minute.
    • Around a 30% cut in people’s pensions.

    If TfL doesn’t do this, the Tories will cut its funding. However, the RMT says the company should not cave in to government demands. It previously said:

    The Mayor and TfL should stand firmly with their workers, the people who kept London’s transport services moving during the pandemic. Instead, they are allowing London Underground managers to cut jobs and undermine employment conditions on the Tube and they continue to indulge the government’s spiteful raid on the TfL pension scheme.

    So, it has been left with no choice but to strike. The action comes after the government and TfL delayed making a decision about pensions specifically until 17 March. RMT London Underground workers will join their colleagues in the rail sector, who are walking out during March and April as well.

    Meanwhile, another union has announced a further strike date. However, this one is not quite as it seems.

    UCU: to strike or not to strike?

    The UCU has been behaving rather oddly of late. First, and as the Canary previously reported, it paused its strikes at universities in February and the first two days of March. The UCU claimed this was due to “significant progress” in talks over pay and pensions with university bosses. General secretary Jo Grady further said the pausing of strikes was to:

    enable us to hold intensive negotiations with the aim of delivering a final agreement

    However, this hasn’t panned out. Instead, national university bosses have decided to impose their pay offer without UCU agreement. As the union wrote:

    the employer chose to put out their pay offer and make it clear that it is final and that universities can implement the initial element of that pay offer. We need to be absolutely crystal clear, this is not a pay offer that has been agreed with us as a union, or any of the other unions involved in the negotiations.

    The UCU claimed it has made progress in other areas. However, the union caving over strikes leading to bosses taking the piss was always going to end badly. As lecturer Philip Proudfoot tweeted:

    So, the UCU has made an about-face and will be striking during March as previously planned, plus on an additional date of 15 March.

    Trusting capitalists is a fool’s game

    Meanwhile, the UCU’s counterparts in the NEU also tabled a similar plan – that it would call off strikes if the government made a “serious” pay offer to it. However, it wasn’t caught napping. The government failed to make an offer. So, the strikes are still on. NEU members will be walking out in different parts of England and Wales on 1, 2 and 3 March.

    The situation with these three unions shows the disparity that exists in the broader movement. While some unions like the RMT won’t have it, others – like the UCU – appear all too willing to give a little when bosses won’t reciprocate the gesture. If trade unions should know anything, it’s that capitalists cannot be trusted. The RMT knows this – but it appears the UCU needs to up its game.

    Featured image via Nick Efford – Wikimedia, resized to 770×403 under licence CC BY-SA 2.0, Politics JOE – YouTube, the UCU – YouTube and the NEU – YouTube

    By Steve Topple

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • The DWP will give staff bonuses for forcing more Universal Credit claimants into work

    The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is once again going to threaten Universal Credit claimants with sanctions. This will happen if they don’t follow new rules around finding work. Worse still, DWP staff will be given bonuses for getting more benefits claimants into work. So, effectively, the DWP is incentivising its Jobcentre advisors to push as many claimants into any job possible – regardless of whether the work is right, or the claimant can even do it.

    Universal Credit: claimants will be targets for staff bonuses

    BBC News reported on a leaked internal DWP document which outlined the new scheme. The department will reportedly be running a pilot of it in 60 Jobcentres. BBC News noted that:

    Staff will be set targets, or what the document calls “into work stretch aspirations”.

    The DWP will also force Universal Credit claimants who have been on the benefit for 13 weeks to do more to keep getting their money. They will have to go to the Jobcentre every weekday for two weeks. If they don’t do this, the DWP will sanction them. The DWP is calling this “intensive support”. With this, the department will make a league table of which Jobcentres force the most Universal Credit claimants into work. The DWP will give staff at the top-performing centres bonuses of £250 in shopping vouchers. ‘Runners-up’ will get £125.

    ‘Almost bully like’

    The DWP told the BBC that:

    It is right that we reward our staff when they go above and beyond, and helping people to secure, stay in, and succeed in work is a key government priority.

    However, people on social media quickly pointed out the numerous problems with the DWP’s plan for Universal Credit claimants.

    A Labour councillor noted how the DWP plan would not support the claimants it needed to:

    Someone else pointed out the issues for chronically ill and disabled people – and also the cost to claimants of daily Jobcentre visits:

    Another Twitter user summarised how staff treat Universal Credit and other claimants:

    Overall, a former DWP staff member summed up some of the problems:

    Of course, the reality is that this is just another callous stunt from the DWP. Moreover, the plan is one it’s used before – to disastrous effect.

    DWP: bringing back deadly policies

    As the Guardian reported in 2013, the DWP was caught up in a scandal over targets. A leaked internal email revealed that Jobcentres were in league tables back then. They ranked the number of claimants staff moved onto tougher benefit regimes – including sanctions. However, the department denied this was widespread policy – despite clear evidence to the contrary. At the time, the number of sanctions was also at a record high.

    Moreover, the DWP giving staff targets in 2013 coincided with the emergence of evidence of claimants dying after the department stopped their benefits by sanctioning them, as well as people taking their own lives after assessors told them they were fit for work.

    The DWP’s new plan is merely a repackaging of this previous, horrendous policy. Sadly, it is not surprising that the department is willing to treat Universal Credit claimants like figures on a spreadsheet. Successive governments have dehumanised people on benefits to the point where the department can do a full circle by bringing back a policy that horrifically failed. Yet it is likely many people won’t bat an eyelid.

    Featured image via the Guardian – YouTube, Paisley Scotland – Flickr, resized under licence CC BY 2.0, and Wikimedia 

    By Steve Topple

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Victims of blacklisting could seek compensation from government, lawyers concur

    Over 21-23 February, the Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI) published a number of closing statements. These were for Tranche 1, relating to undercover policing in 1968-1982. The statements addressed issues raised during past hearings. They include claims of collusion between successive governments and a private blacklisting agency.

    One definition of blacklisting is:

    denying people employment for a particular reason, such as political affiliation, involvement in trade union activity or a history of blowing the whistle.

    Blacklisting can wreck people’s livelihood and can even lead to people’s deaths.

    ‘A case to answer’

    A legal challenge by blacklisting victims who seek compensation has its precedent. In 2016, around 250 workers received millions of pounds in compensation in an out-of-court settlement with construction companies. That’s because those companies subscribed to blacklisting services, provided by the Consultancy Association – a cut-down successor to the Economic League.

    Now, UCPI lead counsel David Barr KC has conceded that, in coordination with undercover police, Special Branch leaked intelligence to private blacklisting companies:

    In his closing statement to the UCPI, Barr pointed out:

    Another purpose for which SDS [Special Demonstration Squad] intelligence reports might have been relied upon by Special Branch was for vetting purposes. We cannot rule out that SDS intelligence reports were leaked by Special Branch officers to private sector organisations, which then used them for blacklisting purposes. The provision of intelligence of this sort to private sector organisations such as the Economic League [EL] was against regulations. However, as we have noted in previous submissions, there appears to have been some recognition that Special Branch officers were, in practice, likely to be tempted to do so.

    When the question was raised about the potential for a civil case against the government for its part in blacklisting, Public Interest Law Centre (PILC) said: “There’s a case to answer”.

    Undercover agencies and blacklisting

    Another closing statement to the UCPI was given on behalf of the Co-operating Group of non-state core participants. It argued that “state agencies” passed on intelligence to “external agencies”, including employers. Furthermore, it argues that SDS reports were used for blacklisting:

    The evidence before this Inquiry reveals that state agencies tasked with countering ‘subversion’ deliberately disseminated intelligence gathered to external agencies…

    The dissemination of intelligence included providing information to employers. The evidence of the senior officers disclosed in T1 makes repeated reference to SDS reports being used for “vetting”, but this was a misnomer as, in reality, the information was being used to blacklist named individuals.

    The Canary previously published evidence from a UCPI opening statement. It included the admission that successive UK governments colluded with the Economic League:

    records suggest that subversion in industry was the principal concern of Government… In this connection there are references within the documents to IRIS Ltd. and the Economic League. It seems from the documents that government was aware of these entities, used them to further its agenda, encouraged their activities and considered them useful.

    Then there’s this from the 2016 Creedon (Operation Herne/Reuben) report on blacklisting:

    Special Branches throughout the UK had direct contact with the Economic League, public authorities, private industry and trade unions.’

    More evidence of blacklisting collusion

    Anti-blacklisting campaigner Dave Smith and researcher/journalist Eveline Lubbers provided an example of state collusion with the Economic League. They quoted Home Office civil servant James Waddell advising prime minister Edward Heath that:

    the general policy of not giving information from official sources… is well-established.

    Waddell added:

    ministers have generally accepted that the most we should do is refer the enquiring industrialists to unofficial sources like the Economic League.

    Waddell is also quoted as telling Heath:

    “we ought not to be too sweeping in anything said about infiltration”, explaining that Special Branch (in addition to MI5) did indeed infiltrate subversive bodies and that “denials about their interest in the unions may be disbelieved”.

    Human rights contravened

    Journalist Mark Watts observed that Barr noted it was “highly questionable” that the UK had complied with the Convention regarding undercover policing operations from the Tranch 1 period (1968 to 1982):

    Neil Sheldon for the Home Office, on the other hand, argued that the UK did not incorporate the Convention into UK legislation until 1988:

    However, the UK ratified the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) – and was the first to do so – in 1951.

    More compensation cannot be ruled out

    Around 700 companies subscribed to the EL. That organisation alone blacklisted at least 40,000 workers over several decades.

    Spies At Work author Mike Hughes previously told the Canary:

    After forty years of studying the history of the Economic League I had given up hope of seeing this sort of conclusive evidence that the League was engaging not just with front line domestic security services, but were 100% integral to “counter subversion” policies at the very highest levels of government. And those were the governments of Wilson, Heath, Callaghan, and Thatcher.

    UK legislation bans blacklists “used by employers or employment agencies for the purposes of discrimination in relation to recruitment or in relation to the treatment of workers”. It only applies to trade union members, or people participating in trade union activities.

    However, given the recently-revealed evidence of government collusion, there’s now a possibility for a civil case. Also, if the UK legal system fails to provide an “adequate remedy”, a case can be raised with the European Court of Human Rights. Thus, further compensation is possible.

    Featured image supplied by the author

    By Tom Coburg

  • Professors join the picket: Workers at 150 UK universities pledge 18 days of strike action

    At the beginning of February, some of the largest strikes in recent memory took place at universities and higher education institutes across the United Kingdom. The University and College Union (UCU), the single biggest trade union of higher education workers in the UK, has called for eighteen days of strike action across 150 universities, setting the stage for 70,000 members of staff to walk off the job in the months of February and March. This collective action is the culmination of built-up frustrations with, and grassroots organizing against, decades of increasingly precarious working conditions, and is focused around two principal points of conflict. 

    Firstly, workers are taking industrial strike action to deal with what has become an endemic practice of precarious employment contracts: a huge proportion of staff working in higher education are no longer securely employed. According to research published by UCU in 2021, 44% of teaching-only contracts are fixed term, rather than permanent jobs; when it comes to research academics, that figure goes up to almost 70%. On top of this, 41% of academic teachers are employed on hourly paid contracts that last, at most, a year at a time, that offer little job security, and that provide wages that are only a fraction of what permanently employed academics make. (Especially for those at the beginning of their careers, job casualization and significant real-terms pay cuts have become increasingly common.)

    It has become incredibly difficult for workers to build careers in academic teaching or research—and for those who manage to do so, the career itself is increasingly precarious, low-paying, and exploitative.

    All of this has combined with a cost-of-living crisis for working people across the UK: inflation has been running at anywhere between 8-11% for much of 2022, and while the University and College Employers Association (UCEA) secured a pay increase offer of around 4% in January of this year, UCU General Secretary Dr. Jo Grady described the offer as “not enough” when it comes to addressing the current cost-of-living crisis or the years of accrued real-terms pay cuts that academics have experienced over the last decade. 

    UCEA’s own research shows that, by some models, academic staff pay has dropped by almost 20% since 2009, reflecting broader employment trends in the UK. Research from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) analyzed by The Guardian, for instance, shows that public sector pay has fallen by anywhere between 4-13% since the financial crisis of 2008. 

    According to research published by UCU in 2021, 44% of teaching-only contracts are fixed term, rather than permanent jobs; when it comes to research academics, that figure goes up to almost 70%. On top of this, 41% of academic teachers are employed on hourly paid contracts that last, at most, a year at a time, that offer little job security, and that provide wages that are only a fraction of what permanently employed academics make.

    The second point of conflict at the heart of the strikes concerns the seismic changes to academic pensions. Traditionally, the arrangement for those working in academia involved accepting generally lower wages over the course of a career in exchange for a secure pension at the end of your working life. However, a package of cuts made to the University Superannuation Scheme (USS) back in 2021 meant that the typical member of staff has lost 35% of their guaranteed retirement income, despite the pension scheme itself claiming assets of over £88 billion. 

    These two major, intersecting issues have placed the entirety of the academic sector under colossal pressure. It has become incredibly difficult for workers to build careers in academic teaching or research—and for those who manage to do so, the career itself is increasingly precarious, low-paying, and exploitative. 

    One bleak detail that’s worth highlighting: When the union was balloting its members (ie, taking a strike vote), some of the language pertaining to the strike action included an agreement for members to take “action short of a strike” (ASOS). Under an ASOS agreement, workers essentially commit to only “work to contract”: that is, to solely performing the duties that employees are contractually obligated to perform. If simply doing your job as it’s described in the terms of your employment contract is something that a union has to ballot staff members on, then obviously that means employers have come to expect—and, in fact, depend on—a tremendous amount of unpaid labor. The very working culture of the entire sector is built around meeting that unjust expectation of work that exceeds one’s contractual duties, and it is fundamentally toxic (I am speaking from experience). It’s important, then, to analyze how things ended up here, what the current challenges facing workers are, and what current or potential strategies exist for fusing the struggles of workers in higher education with the broader, emergent, and increasingly militant trade union movement in the UK. 

    HOW DID WE GET HERE?

    The history of higher education in the UK is the story of its ever-increasing marketization. While, historically, higher education had been funded through grants to students, these were replaced with mortgage-style fees in the 1980s. Tuition fees were introduced in the late 1990s when a Labour government scrapped the grant system entirely. Following this, the Higher Education Act of 2004 allowed for fees of up to £3,000 per year. In 2010, in an intensely controversial move, fees for university tuition were raised to £9,000 a year. In the aftermath of the tuition hikes, 50,000 students took to the streets in one of the largest student protests in contemporary UK history. 

    Coupled with the abolition of caps on student numbers, and the massive corresponding growth in the number of university enrollment places available for students, the new tuition fees brought an influx of cash into the university sector and, of course, a huge spike in student debt. Average projected debt for the cohort who started their courses in 2021-22 is over £45,000, and the national total of outstanding loans is over £180 billion. In a marketized educational system, students become both customer and product—and as working conditions for staff become ever more stretched, learning conditions for students inevitably suffer. 

    The history of higher education in the UK is the story of its ever-increasing marketization.

    With no cap on student numbers and standard fees set to £9,000 per year, competition for students became even more intense. Universities poured money into marketing, recruitment, facilities, and property (if you live in the United States, this will all probably sound depressingly familiar). Huge amounts of capital investment have been financed with debt, all as spending on staff costs have been cut and more student money than ever before has been funneled into the sector. The university sector debt stood at £12 billion back in 2018, leaving universities in the paradoxical situation of having ballooning debts at the same time that more and more money poured into the sector. 

    Caught between these increasing financial pressures and the emergence of a new class of managerial professionals who believe the job of a university is to remain profitable enough to finance its capital expenditure projects, workers found themselves enmeshed in what Mark Fisher called “bureaucratic Stalinism”: new procedures, forms, and justifications of work all designed to enhance productivity and efficiency. What this led to was a complete collapse in trust between workers and management as academic teachers were being monitored and micro-managed more than ever before, while simultaneously being subjected to ever-increasing pressure to recruit more students above all else. 

    On top of this, senior managers and vice chancellors of UK universities saw their own salaries explode, with multiple university leaders taking home over £500,000 a year. The degradation of working conditions for staff, along with the increasing managerial surveillance, precarity of instructor employment, and cuts to pay are directly connected to the marketization of higher education in the UK.

    The COVID-19 pandemic and the aftermath of Brexit proved to be a dangerous combination for a British university sector that was already massively indebted and dependent upon a seemingly never-ending flow of students (particularly international students, who pay hugely inflated fees). These two crises burst the financial bubble that had inflated the sector and exposed the degree to which universities had over-leveraged their debts. 

    The COVID-19 pandemic and the aftermath of Brexit proved to be a dangerous combination for a British university sector that was already massively indebted and dependent upon a seemingly never-ending flow of students (particularly international students, who pay hugely inflated fees). These two crises burst the financial bubble that had inflated the sector and exposed the degree to which universities had over-leveraged their debts.

    According to even the most conservative modeling from the London School of Economics, the collapse in post-Brexit international student enrollments, as well as students putting off university study in the wake of COVID, has left a £2.47 billion funding gap that amounts to the loss of over 30,000 jobs from universities across the country. Unsurprisingly, right-libertarian think tanks saw the possibility of university bankruptcies as a massive opportunity for predatory development, and to push their own culture-war agenda, and openly called for the government to let universities fail. 

    As a result, this latest round of industrial action has to be understood as a reaction to a decades-long experiment in marketization that is, by any metric, a colossal failure. The instability of a marketized system is a feature, not a bug or a sign of inefficiencies. 

    ORGANIZATION

    Between long-standing structural issues in the education sector and the need to try to save jobs in the short term, the challenges of collective organization are immense. To complicate matters, all trade union organizations are subject to the restrictions imposed by the 2016 Trade Union Act—described by the Trade Union Congress as the biggest attack on workers’ rights in a generation. This legislation introduced a host of new regulations designed to make it harder to strike, mandating (among other things) a 50% turnout in any strike ballot, new restrictions on picketing, and that all strike ballots be done via the postal system. It goes without saying that if these rules were the standard by which General Elections had to be conducted, then Britain’s electoral system would barely function. 

    A spokesperson for the executive committee of the UCU branch at the University of Manchester—a university with 40,000 students that is part of the prestigious Russell Group of elite UK universities—emphasized that these rules do make getting the required strike vote turnout a challenge, especially when so much of union organizing is done by and through volunteers. Buddying systems and robust tools for monitoring member engagement are essential tools for making sure that each branch can get a successful ballot. 

    This latest round of industrial action has to be understood as a reaction to a decades-long experiment in marketization that is, by any metric, a colossal failure.

    While Manchester University has not been so hard hit as other UK institutions, junior colleagues are precariously employed and vulnerable. They are often too busy just hanging onto what little work they have and are constantly battling to secure employment commitments from management. The aforementioned UCU spokesperson, who spoke to The Real News under condition of anonymity, pointed out that “few employees relish strike action, but it illustrates a fundamental breakdown in the UK when so many sectors are engaged in action.” Yet the mood from on-the-ground organizers is optimistic. “Strikes provide an opportunity for more people to hear a message of hope for positive change and in some circumstances to reflect on positive improvements that pave the way for better things to emerge,” they said.

    UCU’s national strategy has noticeably improved after the election of Jo Grady as General Secretary of the union. After running an impressive online campaign for the position, Grady adopted a more aggressive social media strategy and explicitly linked the struggle for secure employment and decent pay within the university to the struggle for students to have a good educational experience, arguing that teachers’ working conditions are students’ learning conditions. 

    This strategy has been successful at the Manchester branch, and the union reports that students are supportive, “especially when they understand the circumstances of the staff who they are often in contact with,” the UCU spokesperson said. For members of the Manchester branch, it is important that they “have a good relationship with the formal and informal structures of the student body, and as such we enjoy support from students on picket lines.” The Manchester organizers also point to the ways this strike has built on years of organizing to better integrate the national and local unions. This organizing has bolstered more coordinated action and a renewed interest in platforming worker voices that offer a different vision to the status quo. 

    “Strikes provide an opportunity for more people to hear a message of hope for positive change and in some circumstances to reflect on positive improvements that pave the way for better things to emerge.”

    spokesperson for the executive committee of the UNIVERSITY AND COLLEGE UNION (UCU) branch at the University of Manchester

    Importantly, the union frames the struggle as not just about educational experience but as building a legacy for the students academic workers teach. “Whatever employment conditions we accept will shape the employment and societal conditions our students inherit,” the UCU spokesperson told TRNN. If this framing is successful on a widespread basis—if students stop thinking of themselves as customers or consumers and start understanding themselves as comrades with their teachers—then the marketization model could well be dealt a serious blow. 

    Additionally, the recent wave of strikes in the UK driven by a broad coalition of workers across industries—including teachers, nurses, rail workers, doctors, and even civil servants—has demonstrated a degree of coordination and collaboration that is sorely needed to connect different unions and workforces to one shared struggle. There is real reason to be optimistic as union organizers recognize the importance of building these connections. As the spokesperson from UCU explained:

    “Recent large-scale action indicates there is a real appetite for change in the UK. Many people understand what is driving people to take action—with declining living standards against a backdrop of record wealth transfer to the wealthy in the form of corporate profits. Much of the public sector has been stripped to the bone by austerity and those who are aware of this see protest as a part of what will enable the type of change that will make things in their lives better.”

    If UCU maintains a more militant position on a national level, then there is a chance here to do more than simply defend the last advantages granted by a failing system. There is an opportunity to tackle the question of what the university can look like when built upon a democratic and egalitarian bedrock, where both students and staff have more ownership over, and more agency within, the university system. If, as the old slogan runs, the university is a factory, it isn’t enough to just shut it down—it has to be rebuilt from the ground up, and should be run by those who built it.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • UK shooters still killing most birds with lead despite voluntary phase-out pledge

    The shooting industry recently urged MPs not to introduce statutory limits on the killing of a bird – the woodcock – that is in decline. The industry appears to think that shooters should limit woodcock killing. However, it essentially argued that shooters could do this through “voluntary restraint“. In other words, the industry wants policymakers to trust shooters to regulate themselves.

    A new study has illustrated what restraint shooters are capable of when left to their own devices. In 2020, the industry pledged to eliminate the use of environmentally-heinous lead shot within five years. The probe shows that some three years later, the use of lead shot remains widespread.

    Lead: A dangerous toxin

    Lead is a deeply damaging toxin for humans and the rest of the natural world. As the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust (WWT) has highlighted, lead is a “non-threshold poison”, which means that:

    there is no safe level, for people or wildlife. It gets into the ecosystem and moves up the food chain, eventually affecting predators and humans.

    Nonetheless, the shooting industry commonly uses lead ammunition to kill birds. This is despite the fact that scientists have warned of the dangers of lead shot for some years. As a 2016 paper highlighted, its use poses a threat to waterfowl, along with:

    raptors, scavengers, and other terrestrial species, including humans who frequently consume hunted game.

    Shooting industry pledge

    In 2020, nine UK shooting industry organisations pledged to phase out the use of lead shot. Every year since then, the SHOT-SWITCH research project has monitored progress on this pledge. The project assesses progress by testing shot pheasants on sale in Britain.

    The Conservation Evidence Journal published its latest findings on 27 February. The project sourced 356 pheasants for the 2022/23 analysis. 235 of these birds contained shot pellets, or fragments of them. The analysis of these pellets indicated that shooters had used lead ammunition to kill 94% of the pheasants.

    The project’s researchers highlighted that this is an improvement on the previous two analyses, as they showed that shooters killed over 99% of them with lead ammunition. In light of the poor progress on eliminating lead shot, the authors of the findings said:

    We found no direct evidence of any effect of recent voluntary initiatives to promote the replacement of lead with non-lead ammunition by suppliers and retailers of wild-shot game.

    Little voluntary restraint in practice

    As the non-profit Wild Justice pointed out, the analysis suggests that shooters are voluntarily reducing their use of lead shot by around 2% a year. It emphasised that:

    At this rate of change, it would take the industry another 47 years to phase out the use of lead shot – just a little bit longer than the 5 years they committed to.

    In other words, the shooting industry is failing to show that it’s capable of meaningful voluntary restraint. Clearly, then, statutory measures are needed, both in relation to the protection of woodcock from shooting and the safeguarding of other wildlife – as well as people – from toxic lead shot.

    Despite what the industry would have people – and politicians – believe, voluntary limits are not enough.

    Featured image via Rob Burke / Wikimedia, cropped to 770×403, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

    By Tracy Keeling

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • UK plan to protect animals from tourism abuse weakened as devolved nations fail to opt in

    An Asian elephant called Moti recently lay collapsed on the ground in India for almost four weeks. He passed away on 18 February, despite efforts by the nonprofit Wildlife SOS – and the army – to save him. Tourism effectively killed Moti, with the 35-year-old’s legs ultimately giving out. In other words, Moti was ridden – without the necessary veterinary care – to death.

    Currently, a bill is making its way through parliament in the UK. It could eliminate advertising that entices tourists to engage in elephant-riding and other unethical tourism. The bill promises to outlaw the promotion and sale of all overseas activities that “involve low standards of welfare for animals”.

    But the bill is already being eroded. Both the Scottish and Welsh governments have confirmed to the Canary that they do not intend to seek inclusion in its scope.

    Crackdown on unethical animal tourism

    MPs debated the Animals (Low-Welfare Activities Abroad) Bill for the first time on 3 February. Parliamentarians voted the bill through at that reading. This means it’s progressing to the committee stage, where it will face examination and possible changes.

    The bill appears to extend to England and the North of Ireland as it stands. The devolved governments of Scotland and Wales can choose to consent to the bill – i.e., be included in it – through a Legislative Consent Motion.

    The Animals (Low-Welfare Activities Abroad) Bill is one of a handful of Private Members’ bills that MPs have put forward in recent months. These bills aim to salvage some provisions contained in the now-shelved Animals Abroad Bill.

    The broader Animals Abroad Bill would have comprehensively impacted the UK’s involvement in non-human animal-related issues overseas. It included provisions, for instance, to ban imports of fur and foie gras. However, senior Conservatives like Jacob Rees-Mogg and Mark Spencer reportedly blocked it.

    Devolved governments opt out

    In comments to the Canary, the Scottish government confirmed that it does not intend to take the necessary action to ensure the Animals (Low-Welfare Activities Abroad) Bill extends to the country. Wales doesn’t plan to do so either.

    The Scottish government indicated that the shelving of the Animals Abroad Bill played a part in its reasoning for not supporting the Animals (Low-Welfare Activities Abroad) Bill. A spokesperson told the Canary that although the devolved government “supports the intention” behind the latter bill:

    we believe this issue should have been addressed in the now fallen Animals Abroad Bill. This opportunity has now been sadly lost.

    Moreover, the spokesperson said:

    We would like to give these important proposals our full support. Unfortunately, due to last minute handling by the UK Government, the time we were permitted to consider the legislation or make any necessary amendments was prohibitively short.

    The animal welfare revolution

    In 2021, the UK government released an “action plan for animal welfare”. It said the plan would “revolutionise” the treatment of non-human animals in the UK and protect others abroad. However, it appears that the ruling Conservative Party wasn’t particularly united behind the revolution. Due to this, a number of the plans were put on pause by early 2022. Many of them still hang in the balance.

    The Scottish government spokesperson raised delays in the progress of other promised legislation in their comments. They said:

    We remain open to all discussions relating to animal welfare, including the Kept Animals Bill which has itself suffered significant delay. Legislative proposals on these important issues deserve proper process and consideration and we hope that the UK Government will provide clarity in the near future.

    The Kept Animals Bill would end people having non-human primates as pets and ban the live export of farmed animals, among other measures.

    Meanwhile, a Welsh government spokesperson confirmed that it doesn’t intend to be included in the Animals (Low-Welfare Activities Abroad) Bill either. They said:

    We want all animals to have a good life and we are delivering this through our programme of ambitious animal welfare reforms set out in our Animal Welfare Plan. After careful consideration we have decided to prioritise the welfare of animals in Wales and therefore we won’t be included in the scope of this Bill.

    ‘Surprising and disappointing’

    The Scottish government insisted that it opposes all animal cruelty and added:

    We are committed to ensuring the highest possible animal welfare standards are met both here in Scotland and abroad.

    Save the Asian Elephant’s (STAE) founder Duncan McNair echoed this characterisation in comments to the Canary. STAE is an organisation that campaigns for measures that will eliminate the abuse of elephants in tourism. McNair described both Scotland and Wales as having “good animal welfare record[s]”. For McNair, however, these records are what make their decisions on the bill all the more “surprising and disappointing”. He suggested that with the devolved governments having “no points of principle at all” against the bill, the situation boils down to “retaliatory politics” between the various governments.

    McNair also stressed that the plan to ban unethical tourism has “massive public support”, including in the devolved nations.

    Little unity in the Kingdom

    McNair warned that unless the situation is turned around, elephants and other species abused for tourism will be the ultimate victims.

    Moti’s preventable death illustrates the impact of unethical tourism. Moreover, the injuries that tourism elephants can sustain from working in the industry make up only part of their suffering. Abuse is part and parcel of existence for many individuals. Their training for tourism, for example, can involve being beaten, crushed, and starved, among other abuses.

    The UK needs a strong law against unethical tourism to ensure its holidaymakers aren’t complicit in such abuse. However, there is little certainly currently that the UK can unite behind the necessary robust legislation.

    Featured image via Wildlife SOS / YouTube

    By Tracy Keeling

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Ofgem cuts energy price cap by nearly a quarter, but bills will still rise

    UK regulator Ofgem has announced a lower cap on sky-high energy bills from April. However, buyers will still pay more for gas and electricity because the government is also reducing financial assistance.

    Ofgem said the annual amount suppliers are able to charge an average household would be cut by nearly a quarter. It will fall to £3,280 from £4,279. This new figure shows how much consumers would pay on their suppliers’ most basic tariff if the government’s Energy Price Guarantee (EPG) was not present.

    Ofgem CEO Jonathan Brearley said that the fall mirrors a shift in the price of “wholesale energy for the first time since the gas crisis began”. However, he also warned that:

    prices are unlikely to fall back to the level we saw before the energy crisis.

    As BBC News has reported, the government’s EPG is indeed set to drop. It stated that:

    The typical annual household bill is set to rise from £2,100 to £3,000 in April because government help – known as the Energy Price Guarantee (EPG) – will become less generous and a £400 winter discount on all bills ends.

    ‘Not enough to help’

    Rocio Concha, of consumer pressure group Which?, noted:

    The price cap is coming down, but not by enough to help people who will face a sharp spike in their energy bills in April when the government reduces its financial help

    Market energy costs have slumped in recent months, leading to ludicrous profits for energy companies. Meanwhile, annual inflation in the UK remains above 10%. This is fives times the rate targeted by the Bank of England.

    Rising energy bills will always affect the poorest members of society most profoundly. Think tanks like the Resolution Foundation have pointed out that any increase in price without an increase in wages will result in more households plunging into fuel stress. This means that they spend more than 10% of their income on energy.

    As the Canary’s Steve Topple previously said:

    The level of difference between how hard energy companies are hitting the richest and poorest, coupled with the fact the government knows this and is barely acting is class war. That is, the rich and powerful are knowingly doing things that will suppress the poorest people and keep them in their poverty-stricken place…

    Decisions made by those at the top of society that will plunge 7.5 million families at the bottom into further poverty is class war.

    ‘Out-of-touch government’

    Soaring energy and food bills, coupled with rising interest rates, have triggered a cost of living crisis for millions of households. This has been accompanied by some of the most intense strike action in decades.

    Sharon Graham, general secretary of Unite, said:

    Ofgem’s latest manoeuvres on the energy price cap do next to nothing to ease the pressure on workers and communities already haunted by… their fuel bills

    This out-of-touch government is clearly preparing to pull the plug on protecting consumers and is totally abdicating any responsibility for dealing with the runaway profiteering of energy companies.

    Meanwhile, Rishi Sunak is resisting calls to offer inflation-matching pay rises for public-sector workers, notably thousands of nurses and teachers who are planning more strikes next month.

    The Tories in power can see that households are hurting. They know that bills will go up but plan to cut the EPG subsidy anyway, even though the reasons it was needed in the first place haven’t gone away.

    Nothing has changed. Except the government seems to simply be giving up the pretense that it cares about people being able to afford necessities such as cooking and staying warm.

    Additional reporting via Agence France-Presse

    Featured image via Flickr/ climatejusticecollective, cropped to 770*403 pixels

    By Alex/Rose Cocker

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Once again, Eurovision shows the hypocrisy of racist Britain

    The UK is gearing up to host the Eurovision Song Contest on behalf of 2022 winner Ukraine. On 25 February, the UK announced that it will allocate 3,000 tickets to displaced Ukrainians, as well as ensuring that the event “truly showcases Ukrainian culture” with millions of pounds in funding.

    Culture secretary Liz Frazer said:

    Today’s announcement means that thousands of tickets will be offered to those displaced by war, so that they can take part in a show honouring their homeland, their culture and their music.

    As always, we stand together with the Ukrainian people and their fight for freedom.

    Hypocrisy and racism

    The UK government is adept at gaslighting the British public. It tries to persuade us that it stands for “freedom” and supports those “displaced by war”. However, this is while the UK is instrumental in curtailing freedoms around the world and displacing millions through its support of multiple wars.

    It suits the Tories to show their allegiance to those escaping Russia’s bombs. After all, it can then rally the British population to unite in hatred against a common enemy – Russia – which is always good for a government’s popularity which might otherwise be waning. It’s also very convenient that Russia’s victims are mostly white. After all, racist Britain won’t just open its doors to anyone. If you’re Black or brown, the government will leave you to die – either in our very own English Channel or in our detention centres. And if those things don’t kill you, you’ll be faced with racist attacks from white supremacists.

    Of course, it isn’t just the UK that will be flying its racist flag on Eurovision night. In fact, other European nations – which are just as culpable – will be taking part in the entire, hypocritical charade.

    Europe’s blood-stained policies

    Europe has blood on its hands, whether at its land borders or its sea borders.

    Let’s take the Poland-Belarus border, for example. Millions of Ukrainians have crossed the border into Poland. The EU has freely welcomed them into the Schengen area, as has the UK government into our country. Thousands of other refugees, from countries such as Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan and Iran, have also tried to cross the border to Poland. However, they have experienced the most appalling conditions, and Europe has treated them with contempt.

    People hate these refugees so much that Poland even completed its own sinister border wall to keep them out. Security forces have raped, beaten, stolen from, extorted, and suffered inhuman treatment upon refugees on the Poland/Belarus border, while a number of them have died.

    Now, let’s take Europe’s Mediterranean sea borders. Since 2014, more than 25,000 people have died after trying to reach Europe in dinghies unfit for the perilous journey. And what has the EU done? Pushed back refugees and actively strengthened laws to ensure that people drown.

    And in the wake of the Turkey earthquake which killed thousands, Greece has fortified both its sea and land borders to prevent Turkish, Kurdish and Syrian refugees from crossing into Europe. Greece, too, has its own racist border wall to prevent people from seeking refuge, which it seeks to enlarge.

    We’re to blame

    Of course, it’s vital to remind ourselves just who is to blame for the largest ever worldwide displacement of people. No, it’s not just Russia. The UK was an instrumental force in the military coalition which wrecked Afghanistan. The Canary‘s Joe Glenton has previously reported on:

    the legacy of human rights abuses carried out in Afghanistan by the West and its allies… the bombings, the night raids, the drone attacks or the Western-trained death squads…

    It was also our government that lied about so-called weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in order to begin an illegal war. Ex-prime minister Tony Blair should be tried for war crimes, yet he received a knighthood instead. He remains untouched and unaccountable for the untold number of Iraqi deaths he’s caused and the trauma and deaths of the British soldiers who were forced to fight.

    Then there’s Yemen. The UK has been a crucial ally for the Saudi-led coalition in its annihilation of the country. The war has killed hundreds of thousands, while millions are suffering from extreme poverty, hunger and malnutrition. A United Nations (UN) 2021 report stated that 1.3 million people would die by 2030.

    Meanwhile, British arms companies have made billions in profits as the government grants them export licences to sell arms to Saudi Arabia. The UK – and the private arms companies around the country creating the weapons – are complicit in every Yemeni death since.

    Israel and Eurovision

    Finally, let’s talk about the people of Palestine. Their lives have been torn apart by the UK’s staunch ally, Israel, since Zionist forces ethnically cleansed 750,000 Palestinians from their land in 1948. Eurovision fans across Europe showed either their apathy or their contempt for Palestinian lives when they voted for Israel to win the contest in 2018. Palestinians and their supporters called for an international boycott of Eurovision when Israel hosted it in 2019. However, Palestinian lives were not deemed worthy enough by white Europeans, of course.

    I previously wrote:

    Since 1973 – the year that Israel joined the contest – there has never been an all-out ban on the country participating. Not even after Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s assault on Gaza in 2008, in which it murdered around 1,400 Palestinians. And not after 2012’s Operation Pillar of Defense, which saw tens of thousands fleeing their homes. In fact, Israel hosted Eurovision 2019 at the same time as its depraved snipers were gunning down Palestinians who were protesting in the Great March of Return.

    Once again, it’s British arms companies that are profiting from the never-ending cruelty that Israel inflicts on Palestinian people.

    Time to self-reflect

    So if, like me, you’re white, and you’re planning to enjoy Eurovision, please take some time to reflect on the possible racism inside of you. Why, as the British public, do we see nothing wrong with locking up Black and brown people, yet condone war when it displaces white people? Let’s ask ourselves: what is the difference between Ukrainian refugees and the people left to rot on the Poland-Belarus border, or in our own Manston detention centre? Why do we show our compassion for people fleeing from one country, yet show contempt for others? The answer is, of course, because of the skin colour and religion of those we’re choosing to either support or leave to die.

    The Canary‘s Maryam Jameela previously summed up the mentality of people in Britain when she wrote:

    It’s almost as though people in the UK don’t value and respect the lives of Black and brown people. They merely tolerate us. They don’t value us as human beings; they see us as cockroaches to keep out of the way. Ukrainian people are considered as a whole – their culture, their traditions, their communities. Black and brown people don’t get that luxury. This is because white people only consider fellow white people to have inalienable rights.

    Of course, the Canary isn’t against the housing of Ukrainian refugees, nor are we against the celebration of Ukrainian culture. But these levels of hypocrisy among the British public can’t go on. If we stand with the Ukrainian people, then we need to stand with every single person who is displaced by war – no matter what their skin colour or religion.

    Featured image via YouTube

    By Eliza Egret

  • Royal Mail shows just why trade unions shouldn’t back down over strikes

    The Communication Workers Union (CWU) has been standing firm in the face of Royal Mail‘s appalling behaviour. As recent events show, the union is right to do so – as the company’s boss Simon Thompson has once again exposed himself as an odious hack. Sadly, it seems not every union is following the CWU’s lead – as another workers’ organisation has paused its strikes. However, does this point to larger problems with the UK’s trade unions?

    Royal Mail: the shambles continues

    MPs hauled Royal Mail boss Thompson back in front of a select committee on Wednesday 22 February. It was over previous evidence he gave to the business, energy and industrial strategy (BEIS) committee.

    As the Canary previously reported, the committee had doubts over whether or not Thompson’s previous evidence was actually true. For example, he’d said that Royal Mail managers did not track employees to see how quickly they were working. However, the committee received evidence to show that this wasn’t the case, so it called Thompson back. And this time, his performance was no better.

    For example, Thompson admitted during this second hearing that he has still not done anything about managers tracking workers. This was despite the committee previously raising it as a concern. BEIS committee member and Labour MP Andy McDonald told Thompson it was “frustrating” that:

    having had notice that this was a major area of concern, that today you’re going to go away from this second hearing, to say to your organisation… ‘we are not going to use data in pursuit of these matters’. Shouldn’t have that been done a long, long time ago?

    Thompson’s response was to deflect and blame other people. This was a running theme throughout his shady evidence – as the chair of the BEIS committee, Labour’s Darren Jones, summed up during the hearing:

    Thompson’s position is becoming untenable. It remains to be seen how long other Royal Mail bosses and shareholders will put up with his nonsense.

    So, the CWU is rightly sticking it to Thompson – not least because as a boss, he can’t be trusted. The union is preparing more potential strike action after a huge ‘yes’ from its re-ballot. However, elsewhere in the union movement, not everyone was quite so resolute over strikes.

    The RCN: another union backs down

    The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) has followed the University and College Union (UCU) and paused strike action so it can have “intensive talks” with the Tory government. BBC News reported that:

    Health Secretary Stephen Barclay will sit down with RCN leader Pat Cullen to discuss a compromise deal to end the stand-off over pay.

    The talks are likely to focus on next year’s pay rise, which is due in April.

    One option is to backdate it by several months, effectively giving nurses an extra pay boost for part of this year.

    But the RCN-government talks come as other unions in the NHS are striking. For example, junior doctors with the British Medical Association (BMA) have recently voted to walk out. Meanwhile, ambulance strikes from other unions are still ongoing. So the RCN’s actions clearly did not go down well with other unions – as a pointed tweet from Unison general secretary Christina McAnea showed:

    Some nurses themselves weren’t impressed with the RCN’s stance, either:

    So, the union’s decision seems self-serving regarding other NHS workers, and misplaced for its own members. Moreover, as the Canary previously wrote about the UCU, there are issues of democracy here, too:

    That a union can take such a drastic top-down decision is not uncommon, but it’s certainly of concern…

    Meanwhile, the National Education Union (NEU) looked like it was going to pull a similar stunt to the RCN. However, it appears to have changed at the last minute.

    The NEU had said that it would call off strikes if the government made a “serious proposal” over pay. It gave a deadline of Saturday 25 February – a date which came and went with no movement from the Tories. So, the NEU said the strikes are still on. As Yahoo News reported:

    Regional walkouts by NEU members are planned for February 28, March 1 and March 2, with national strike action across England and Wales planned for March 15 and March 16.

    Trade unions: letting working class people down?

    What recent developments across the trade union movement show is that some organisations have been more fearless and strong-willed than others. The CWU seems unwilling to back down in the face of Royal Mail and government pressure. However, others like the UCU and RCN have given ground to bosses and the Tories when it’s really not justified.

    At a time when so many working class people are suffering in the UK, trade unions should be thinking about the bigger picture. It’s easy to argue that these organisations are only supposed to defend their members. However, this ignores the class intersections that run through all these disputes. All working class people in the UK would benefit from a united and radical trade union movement. Sadly, it’s becoming apparent that’s not what we currently have.

    Featured image via CWU Live – YouTube

    By Steve Topple

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Patriotic Alternative had a bad weekend, despite the Guardian amplifying its views

    Far-right group Patriotic Alternative was out on Saturday 25 February in Newquay and Skegness, stoking racist and fascist sentiment under the guise of ‘protesting’ against refugees. Fortunately, anti-fascists were also out to counter the group.

    However, the Guardian was seemingly unconcerned about the fascist group’s Nazi leanings. This is because it managed to give a platform to Patriotic Alternative to voice its hateful rhetoric.

    Newquay: no room for fascists

    First, in Newquay far-right mob Patriotic Alternative had organised a protest over refugees staying at a local hotel. However, grassroots coalition Cornwall Resists organised itself to come and show solidarity with the refugees:

    The predictable corporate media appeasement of the far-right ensued. ITV News reported the situation as “rival groups” protesting. It failed to mention that Patriotic Alternative had organised the racist protest. Cornwall Live did the same, saying:

    The original protest was organised because some residents of Newquay claim they feel unsafe with some 200 asylum seekers staying in one of the town’s hotels.

    Again, this is literally not true, as Cornwall Resists has evidence that the far-right group organised the protest. However, the far-right failed to achieve anything with the ‘protest’, and eventually left:

    Cornwall Resists said:

    This was effective grassroots resistance and was an amazing and emotional display of solidarity and strength…

    Protesters passed flowers to the residents through the doors, and a very emotional moment was shared with the people in the hotel, with lots of smiles and tears!

    Once the fash had gone, a spokesperson came out of the hotel to speak to us. They said that the residents had been advised not to leave the hotel for their safety, but that they wanted to come and give us all a hug. They said emotions had been high in the hotel, and there was a feeling of joy and solidarity on the day.

    Patriotic Alternative: mainstreamed by the Guardian

    Meanwhile, Patriotic Alternative had also mobilised in Skegness on 25 February – but so did the anti-fascists:

    However, the Guardian managed to legitimise Patriotic Alternative by quoting one of its supporters.

    Of course, the outlet has form on mainstreaming the far right. A research paper looked at a Guardian series on “populism” in politics. Researchers Katy Brown and Aurelien Mondon concluded that, among other things, the Guardian “trivilaised” and “amplified” the far right – exactly what it did with its article about the Skegness protest.

    With Patriotic Alternative, the Guardian is also literally amplifying Nazi sympathisers. As even Kent Live managed to report, the founder of Patriotic Alternative Mark Collett has described:

    himself as a “Nazi sympathiser”. In his book The Fall of Western Man, Collet wrote that he would have been proud to have been part of Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies.

    He was captured on camera saying how thinks 1930s Germany would be better to grow up in than modern day Britain…

    He appeared in a 2002 documentary called ‘Young Nazi and Proud’…

    Yet still, the Guardian thought it was okay to platform the group’s views.

    Oppose at all costs

    While the anti-fascists dampened the far-right in Newquay and Skegness, this isn’t the end of Patriotic Alternative’s actions. There’s one in Dover on 4 March and another one Llantwit on 25 March. However, so far the corporate media has done little to call the group out for what it is: a far-right group led by a literal Nazi. As Brown and Mondon summed up in their research paper:

    As the coverage of far-right politics has been both euphemised and amplified through its coverage as populist, and its origins deflected onto the people qua working class, we have witnessed a move towards accepting the diagnosis offered by the far right not only as inevitable but in fact democratic.

    That is, corporate media outlets like the Guardian are legitimising the far-right and strengthening it by giving it column inches. All the more reason for everyone who opposes fascism to get out in communities and show people that there is another way.

    Featured image via Cornwall Resists 

    By Steve Topple

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Four Kill the Bill defendants have been sentenced to nearly eleven years between them this week

    This week, Bristol Crown Court sentenced four defendants to nearly 11 years in prison between them. Police arrested all four for their role in Bristol’s 21 March 2021 Kill the Bill demonstration.

    Judge Patrick – who has become infamous in Bristol for handing out brutal sentences to the Bristol ‘riot’ defendants – sentenced Dominic Gillett to four years and eight months in prison. Dominic had pled guilty to ‘riot’. Joe Paxton and Indigo Bond received sentences of 27 months and 20 months respectively. Indigo and Joe were both found not guilty of riot in 2022 by juries, but had offered guilty pleas to the lesser charge of violent disorder.

    Charlie Milton received 26 months for violent disorder.

    On Friday 24 February, a demonstration in solidarity with the defendants was held outside Bristol Crown Court. Demonstrators chanted:

    Our passion for freedom is stronger than your prisons!

    From a demonstration to an uprising

    On 21 March 2021, officers from Avon and Somerset police attacked demonstrators with batons, and deployed horses and dogs against the protest. In footage from the night police officers can be seen repeatedly hitting people over the head with their riot shields

    The protest was against the draconian Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts (PCSC) Bill, now enacted into law. It took place just after the brutal rape and murder of Sarah Everard by serving police officer Wayne Couzens, and the mood was both angry and defiant. The police’s brutality toward the crowd was the final straw, and the demonstration became an anti-police uprising. When the police attacked, the crowd fought back.

    By the end of the evening protesters had smashed the windows of Bridewell Police Station, and several police vehicles were in flames.

    Massive sentences

    The Crown Court has so far imprisoned at least 32 people for their role that night, and in the demonstrations that followed. On top of that, one person is currently on remand. Their combined sentences total over 96 years in prison. Ryan Roberts was given the longest stretch so far – a massive 14 years.

    These 32 Kill the Bill prisoners are among an increasing number of people imprisoned in relation to political demonstrations. At least 54 people are reportedly serving time in the UK for their roles in protests and direct action.

    Almost all of the defendants were initially charged with riot, the most serious charge in English public order law. Riot carries a maximum sentence of ten years in prison, and has historically been used fairly rarely outside of Northern Ireland. The riot charge – for example – was not used against most of those arrested in the UK’s 2011 uprisings in London and elsewhere. On that occasion, the state opted to prosecute the majority of people for the lesser charge of violent disorder.

    But in recent years, riot has been increasingly used by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). For example, last year 18 people were imprisoned for riot after a confrontation with police broke out at a wake in Swansea.

    Protecting a way of life

    Many of the people now in prison went out to demonstrate against the PCSC Act because it would threaten their way of life. The Act targets the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller (GRT) community by allowing police to arrest people for residing in a vehicle  without the landowner’s permission, and even to confiscate their homes.

    Dominic Gillett – who was sentenced to over 4 years this week – had previously lived in a vehicle. Indigo Bond comes from a Traveller background too.

    Both Dominic and Indigo had joined the protest partly because of how the law would affect people living in vehicles.

    Dominic’s barrister told Bristol Crown Court on Tuesday that:

    He’d been living in a caravan before, and felt threatened by the Bill.

    Indigo told the court last year that she “didn’t agree with the bill because of its effects” on Travellers:

    I come from a travelling background, my grandad was a Traveller and my dad too.

    The PCSC Act is a direct threat to GRT livelihoods, it’s not surprising that people took to the streets to fight back.

    Protecting each other

    All of the people imprisoned this week were defending themselves – and others – from the violence of the police.

    On Tuesday, the court heard how Joe Paxton had carried Fleur Moody out of the crowd to safety. Fleur had been hit on the head by an overarm baton strike from an officer, in clear breach of police guidelines.

    The charges against Joe included the accusation that he tried to wrestle a police riot shield away from an officer. However, his defence barrister argued that he was trying to protect his partner – who the had already been badly beaten by officers.

    Indigo told the jury at her previous trial that she had stayed at the demonstration because:

    I thought it was important to help people who were being hit worse than me.

    She also said that she had kicked at the officers:

    to get them back, because I had seen them brutally hitting people next to me.

    Dominic Gillett’s defence barrister explained how he had kicked out after police officers hit a person standing next to him. She added that he had tried to give first aid to people who had been pepper sprayed by the police.

    The court also heard how Charlie Milton had shouted at an officer to put his baton down.

    ‘Our children should be released’

    Members of Justice for Bristol Protesters – a group of parents, friends, and supporters of the defendants – told the Canary that they are outraged and devastated by the harsh sentences still being handed out to their loved ones. One parent said:

    Our children are being sent to prison for reacting to the violence of some police on that day. Protesters were beaten black and blue yet not a single officer has been exposed, questioned or called to account. The convictions have a political motive and our children are political prisoners.

    The group statement continued:

    The police brutality experienced by the majority of the protesters, the drip, drip, drip approach to prosecutions and the long delays in sentencing is leaving these young people traumatised and vulnerable. Most of the young women prosecuted are being sent to HMP Eastwood Park, which has recently been heavily criticised by prison inspectors as ‘fundamentally unequipped to support the women in its care’ with cells ‘appalling, dilapidated and covered in graffiti’, one blood-splattered and some with extensive scratches on the walls.

    Another parent commented:

    The charges should be dropped and our children released.

    Brutal sentences becoming dangerously normalised

    I was there on 21 March 2021, and witnessed the events unfold. Since then, I have watched dozens of people receive prison sentences for their part in the uprising outside Bridewell. Like many other people in Bristol, I am full of sadness, anger and rage that they are being sentenced to years in prison for resisting against a brutal onslaught by Avon and Somerset police.

    I am proud of all the people who stood up against the police that night. And I am glad to live in a community where people aren’t scared to fight back. But it is terrifying that these sentences are becoming more and more normal.

    We must never let go of our rage and defiance at a system that imprisons our comrades. Further, we must always insist on fighting against injustice. We must remember the rebels of Bridewell, and support them through their sentences. Most of all, we need to continue to struggle against the system that put them there, and never let the fire of resistance – that burned so brightly that night at Bridewell – be extinguished.

    People in Bristol have set up a fund to support the Kill the Bill defendants through their sentences. You can donate here.

    Featured image via Bristol Anti Repression Campaign – with permission

    By Tom Anderson

  • Haringey council flat fire has ‘echoes of Grenfell’ as residents take action over ‘traumatic ordeal’

    A fire in a block of council flats near Tottenham has ‘echoes of Grenfell‘ according to residents, who have expressed fear over their safety. One local social housing group has exposed the failings of Haringey council. However, people living in and around Kenneth Robbins House say that the council is ‘not doing it job’ – and it could end in disaster.

    Fire at Kenneth Robbins House

    As Haringey Community Press reported, around 60 firefighters in eight engines were at the scene at Kenneth Robbins House. The block forms part of the Northumberland Park council estate in the borough. Fire fighters battled the blaze for around two hours on Friday 17 February. They led one person to safety and treated them for smoke inhalation. Residents were evacuated and the Labour-run council placed four households in emergency accommodation, seemingly only for the night:

    So far, investigators have not said what caused the fire. Meanwhile, Haringey council has said it is “supporting” residents. However, as journalist Olivia Opara said on the day of the fire via Twitter:

    Echoes of concerns regarding the safety of the building as residents stand out in the cold with worry about their home as some recall the incident of Grenfell Tower years ago.

    The Canary has spoken to one local campaign group. It indeed echoed concerns over the council’s management of Kenneth Robbins House, as well as other council housing on the estate too.

    Haringey council: a catalogue of failings

    Campaign group Haringey Defend Council Housing (HDCH) has been looking into the council’s management of the estate. Its secretary Paul Burnham has raised serious concerns over the state of the properties. He told the Canary:

    The most recent fire risk assessment for Kenneth Robbins House shows that there were far too many fire safety actions that the Council should have done, but did not do, in the preceding year. It is a dire catalogue of failures. No wonder residents are concerned.

    Burnham said these failures included the council not:

    • specifying the combustibility of the composite spandrel panels on the outside of the block.
    • checking smoke alarm systems in all flats.
    • remediating non-compliant windows above the front doors of flats to meet fire rating.
    • providing new FD60S door sets so that one of the lifts can be used as a fire fighting shaft.
    • fire stopping or replacing Georgian wired glazed panels with 60 minute standard glazing.
    • investigating the fire stopping behind the meter viewing panels next to each flat.
    • investigating behind vents and ducts on two floors to confirm fire stopping and fire damping.

    The combustibility of the external materials on the block is understandably a huge worry for residents in the wake of Grenfell. Crucially, HDCH says that all these actions became overdue, based on the council’s own criteria, on 9 May 2022. However, these kind of alleged failings are also borough-wide. HDCH says that:

    In February 2022, the 20,000 Haringey Council tenanted and leasehold homes had 13,335 overdue fire safety actions overdue.

    The comparable figures are no longer published by Haringey Council.

    So, HDCH has been working with local residents’ group Northumberland Park People. The groups organised a meeting on Tuesday 21 March where residents of Kenneth Robbins House and the overall estate could share their personal concerns about poor fire safety, poor living conditions, and the delayed redevelopment the council has supposed to have performed.

    People are traumatised

    At the meeting, people spoke about about constant water leaks, mould, poor personal safety, and poor fire safety. Jacob Oti is a resident of Kenneth Robbins House. He said in a statement for the Canary:

    It was my dad’s flat that caught fire tragically on Friday. I am traumatised by my ordeal and the ordeal of my family. I can see that we are not alone, and it has inspired me to speak up on behalf of other people as well, people who have been forgotten when really they should be the priority.

    So what I would like to ask is not only that we come together as a community now, to really fight on behalf of ourselves, but we also take up the fight for everybody else that is not getting the right care that they are meant to be getting. Because at the end of the day we can see that people in positions of power are not doing their jobs here, they are not thinking about us, they are not putting us first, and it if we don’t put ourselves first, then no–one else is going to do it for us.

    Residents are understandably furious and scared. They will be meeting again on Wednesday 1 March to discuss what to do next.

    Haringey council says…

    The Canary asked Haringey council for comment. We specifically put HDCH’s allegations over fire safety failures to it. Councillor Dana Carlin is the cabinet member for housing services, private renters, and planning. She told the Canary:

    The safety of our residents will always be our number one priority and I am thankful that all of the fire safety provisions worked inside the flat and prevented it spreading to other areas of the building.

    As the London Fire Brigade have stated, the fire was believed to be accidental and caused by the unsafe use of incense sticks. It has no direct link whatsoever to the other issues that we are currently addressing.

    We have identified medium priority works which under our internal target would ordinarily be within six months. However, there are times we may take the decision to include any works associated with fire risks in a wider major works programme and this is the case with Kenneth Robbins House.

    We will be carrying out consultations with leaseholders and residents and will then be able to confirm a start date for the works to take place.

    Echoes of Grenfell

    As Opara noted, all of this has echoes of the Grenfell Tower disaster, where failings by multiple organisations led to the deaths of 72 people on 14 June 2017. As the Canary‘s Sophia Akram previously wrote:

    around seven months… [before the fire] an action group representing the concerns of the estate warned this very type of incident could happen.

    In November 2016, the Grenfell Action Group (GAG) wrote on its blog:

    “Unfortunately, the Grenfell Action Group have reached the conclusion that only an incident that results in serious loss of life of KCTMO [Kensington and Chelsea Tenancy Management Organisation] residents will allow the external scrutiny to occur that will shine a light on the practices that characterise the malign governance of this non-functioning organisation… It is our conviction that a serious fire in a tower block or similar high density residential property is the most likely reason that those who wield power at the KCTMO will be found out and brought to justice!”

    Moreover, Northumberland Park as a ward and its demographic makeup cannot be ignored. It is the most deprived area in Haringey, and parts of it are among the most deprived areas in England. The ward has a larger population of Black people than the borough and London averages, and it has more people who are also reliant on benefits, unemployed or classed as the ‘lowest grade workers’. Time will tell whether institutional racism and classism from the council has played its part in the fire safety failures. Carlin’s response to the Canary, blaming the resident for the fire while not addressing the concerns of others, doesn’t exactly do much to instill confidence in this area.

    Haringey council must act

    Residents of Kenneth Robbins House and the Northumberland Park estate are now warning Haringey council that it is catastrophically failing them. They are drawing attention to serious concerns over fire safety. However, as Burnham summed up to the Canary:

    At Kenneth Robbins House the Council did not do what they needed to do. They had six months to do fire-stopping in the cupboards, but they did not do it in a year. They had six months to check the panels on the outside of the building to see if they would catch fire or spread fire, but they did not do it in a year.

    Haringey council needs to act immediately to bring fire safety actions up to date. It needs to fully communicate and consult with residents over their concerns. Moreover, it needs to ensure that it goes beyond these actions and delivers meaningful change for everyone living in its properties across the borough. Anything less will be utterly negligent – and potentially deadly.

    Featured image via Olivia Opara – screengrab

    By Steve Topple

  • Western-trained Afghan special forces said to be fighting for Putin’s Wagner Group

    Elite Afghan commandoes trained by the West may already be fighting alongside Russian Wagner Group mercenaries against Ukraine, reports claim. Both the mercenary organization and the Afghan commandos have been linked with war crimes and atrocities in the past.

    This is an example of the unintended consequences of Western imperial tinkering. British and American military expertise are being repurposed and brought to bear against the West – and not for the first time.

    There should be a full, frank and public accounting of Western-trained troops, who in Afghanistan acted as brutal death squads, now working on behalf of official ‘enemies’.

    Indeed, in the wake of the Afghan withdrawal in 2021, Tory MPs even suggested Afghan special forces be formed into a new British Army regiment like the Gurkhas. One even told parliament that their loyalty was proven, but now they appear to be fighting for Russia.

    Zero Units

    In 2020 I returned to Afghanistan after nearly 14 years to make a documentary. I had previously served there as a British soldier in 2006.

    Within two years of my trip, the American-led occupation collapsed and the Taliban were back in power. Since then then we have learned that US allies in government may have accepted bribes to not resist the Taliban. But back in 2020 my focus was the Zero Units: shadowy, CIA-controlled death squads said to have killed numerous innocent civilians. The Zero Units were one key component of Afghan special forces, led by US operators and largely unaccountable.

    When the occupation collapsed in 2021, the Zero Units’ locations became even harder to keep tabs on. What is clear is that some ended up being evacuated to the West. One of the few outlets to cover the story was the Intercept, which reported that Zero Unit veterans would be given a fresh start in the US – despite war crimes allegations. Their new lives in America were even detailed in interviews.

    Others, we are told, were quietly airlifted out to the UK to work with British special forces, by whom they had been trained.

    New regiments?

    After the occupation collapsed, three Tory MPs backed a call to integrate Afghan special forces who had reached the UK into the British military. They were all ex-army officers, and at least two of them served in Afghanistan.

    Tom Tugendhat MP, an Afghanistan veteran and current Tory security minister, told reporters:

    We trained and fought alongside many Afghans who are now in the UK.

    They’ve proved their loyalty a thousand times.

    If they want to serve, we should welcome them, I would love to see a regiment of Afghan scouts.

    Meanwhile, Tobias Elwood – who has served in defence and foreign affairs roles in government – said:

    Given that we’ve helped train these forces, it’s certainly something that needs to be a consideration.

    One avenue is they are kept as a unit, as the Gurkhas have operated.

    The other avenue is they are blended into our own system.

    And Johnny Mercer, an Afghanistan veteran and serving veterans minister, told reporters at the time it would be an “absolute waste not to make use of them”.

    Interestingly, Tugendhat and Ellwood are perhaps best known for their hawkishness on Russia and China. Meanwhile, proposals to place Afghan veterans into British regiments have gone quiet.

    Wagner Group

    The Wagner Group is a private military company closely aligned with Vladimir Putin’s regime. It is been rightly criticised for its operations in Africa, including in Libya and Mali. However, as the Canary has pointed out before, such criticisms are not especially convincing from UK ministers. Indeed, the UK has a thriving mercenary trade itself.

    It is not entirely clear how former Afghan commandos came to be working with the Wagner Group. However, Middle East Monitor reported on Friday 24th February:

    When the US left Afghanistan in 2021, some 20,000-30,000 commandos were out of work and being hunted by the Taliban. According to several reports, these Afghan commandos fled to Iran, where they were recruited by a Russian mercenary outfit called the Wagner Group, who promised them good salaries and help to relocate their families.

    This claim was based on reportage by Radio Free Europe from December 2022 which went into greater depth:

    Lost status and a desperate existence in Iran are driving thousands of former Afghan troops – many of them elite commandos trained by the United States – to consider fighting as mercenaries in Ukraine and other battlefields.

    During the fall of Afghanistan, many Afghans, including military personnel, fled to neighbouring Iran. This aligns with the Radio Free Europe claim that:

    Afghan soldiers in Iran who have said they plan to take Wagner up on its recruitment offers say they were betrayed by the United States and the U.S.-backed Afghan government that they fought for. Many blame them for their current predicament.

    Betrayal and blowback

    Not everyone who wanted to get out of Afghanistan in 2021 could. The scenes of chaos at Kabul airport in late summer 2021 will stick in the mind of anyone who spent time in the country. So they should, despite attempts by the British establishment press at rewriting the legacy of both the 20-year war and the subsequent defeat.

    It may be understandable, then, that those whom the West trained to fight for it and then left destitute and homeless in neighbouring countries might look to Russia as a route out of their predicament.

    With the betrayal, comes the blowback. Western-backed and –trained Ukrainian soldiers may now face Western-trained Afghans on the frontlines of a war in Europe.

    What must follow is a proper account of how this came to be. Without serious reflection and accountability, we will repeat ourselves again.

    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/Rhett Hillard, cropped to 770 x 403.

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • A woman living with ME and EDS is dying in front of her husband’s eyes in an NHS hospital

    A woman is fighting for her life in hospital after doctors refused to let her see specialists that may be able to help her. She lives with severe chronic illness – myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) and Ehlers-Danlos syndromes (EDS). So, her husband has issued a desperate cry for help on her behalf.

    Sadly, her story will not be unfamiliar to some people. This is because NHS treatment for this disease is at best dire – and at worst, life threatening.

    ME and EDS

    ME is a chronic systemic neuroimmune disease, not dissimilar to long Covid. Medical professionals generally claim there is no known cure for ME. As the Canary previously wrote:

    Some doctors have managed to get patients better. Yet only around 6% of people with ME have remission from the disease. But the cause of it is often clear. Because in around 50% of cases, people get ME following a viral infection. It’s almost as if the virus never leaves them. Some studies have shown people with ME have a constant, increased immune system response. It’s like the person’s body thinks it’s constantly fighting a virus which isn’t there.

    You can read more about ME and its symptoms here.

    EDS is a chronic, genetic, hereditary illness. It’s made up of a group of connective tissue disorders. This means that a person’s collagen is defective. As the Canary previously wrote, in EDS, collagen doesn’t work properly:

    Imagine a bungee rope that doesn’t spring back up, or a hair band that isn’t taut. That’s what EDS is like. Most parts of a person’s body are not held in place correctly – so none of them work the way they’re meant to. There are currently 13 types of EDS. Some are life-threatening, like vascular EDS. Others are less aggressive, like classical. The hypermobile subtype is the only one without a genetic marker. But all are impairing in their own way.

    You can read more about EDS and its symptoms here.

    To live with one of these chronic illnesses is bad enough. However, to live with both and more can be catastrophic – as Sami Berry’s situation shows.

    Sami: doctors refusing to give the right support

    Sami formerly worked in the NHS before becoming severely ill. She lives with ME, EDS, and epilepsy. And since November 2022, she has been in hospital fighting for her life.

    Campaign group ME Action UK said in a press release:

    Sami is very concerned she is going into intestinal failure as severe ME and EDS has made her body unable to digest nutrients even through a feeding tube. NHS doctors are refusing to provide her with drugs that previously helped her regain nutritional levels, or refer her to a specialist. She is vomiting repeatedly, and cannot even keep 4ml down. It has been 26 days without food. Her blood sugar levels are dangerously low. Sami and her family are requesting that the hospital transfer her care to specialists who understand how to treat severe ME and EDS.

    Some of the major complications with EDS are gastrointestinal. As the charity Ehlers-Danlos UK wrote, in some types of the illness the most severe form can be gastroparesis. This is where the stomach does not empty, meaning food cannot pass into the small intestine. The Mayo Clinic noted that:

    Gastroparesis can interfere with normal digestion, cause nausea, vomiting and abdominal pain. It can also cause problems with blood sugar levels and nutrition.

    It is unclear if this is what Sami is living with. However, if she did have gastroparesis and then had severe ME on top, this could make her critically ill.

    ‘Dying in front of my eyes’

    Sami’s husband Craig said in a press release:

    I am slowly watching my wife die in front of my eyes. The doctors at the hospital are refusing to provide her with drugs that previously helped her regain nutritional levels. Her epilepsy has returned after three years. Her consultant has said that he will not necessarily take the advice of the specialists, again with no explanation. The PALS [Patient Advice and Liaison Service], dietary, nursing team and general surgeons have all voiced confusion about what the doctors are doing. I’m terrified I’m going to lose my wife because the doctors refuse to treat her inability to absorb nutrients.

    ME Action said of Sami’s situation:

    Sami and her husband, Craig, have made the wrenching decision to go public with this story because they fear Sami will die if the NHS does not begin to take her situation seriously, and provide adequate care.

    The organisation said in an update on its website that:

    As of Wednesday the 8th of February following a Care Team meeting, Sami has no confidence that she will receive even the minimum of care she needs to stay alive, much less have a quality of life. While Sami has finally been given a tertiary to an expert, it is not scheduled until March 8th and will be done through private pay. Her past experience with her hospital care and what she has been told by her present consultant have made her extremely concerned that the specialist’s advice will not necessarily be taken on board and immediately implemented. She is running out of time.

    Severe ME can have tragic consequences

    However, the concern that ME Action highlighted is that people living with ME have previously died due to it:

    • In 2021, Maeve Boothby O’Neill died from severe ME at the age of 27 after the NHS essentially let her starve to death. She was denied a feeding tube, and later denied total parenteral nutrition, which likely would have saved her life. An inquest into Maeve’s situation is expected to be held later this year. Maeve’s father wrote about his daughter’s tragic story for the Times.
    • In 2018, Merryn Crofts died at the age of 20 after she starved to death due to severe ME.
    • In 2003, 32-year-old Sophia Mirza died from severe ME after having been forcibly removed from her home and sectioned to a psychiatric ward, while the NHS failed to treat her underlying conditions that led to her death.

    Tragically, two more people have recently died after living with severe ME as well.

    Anna Fitzgerald-Clark died on Christmas Day 2022. She lived with severe ME, but little information exists online about her. She does have a page where people can donate to charity Action for ME – here.

    Then, just after New Year’s 2023, Kara Jane Spencer also died. She was a talented singer-songwriter, who recorded an album to raise money for ME research. Her representatives said in a statement that:

    In the end her body was too frail to survive. Her spirit remained strong till the last, and she faced the end with the same incredible courage that she showed throughout her illness.

    Kara was a very special young woman who embraced life with love, generosity and endless determination. To know her was to know a unique human being, whose spirit never wavered despite the most tremendous suffering.

    People can donate to Kara Jane’s campaign here.

    It is Sami and her family’s fear that she, too, will end up so unwell that she eventually dies. However, it seems currently that the NHS hospital she’s in is failing to recognise this – which is of little wonder, given the scandal surrounding the treatment of both ME and EDS.

    Chronic illness: chronically psychologised

    ME has been marred by controversy – not least being the flawed and dangerous treatments which the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) only took out of its recommendations in 2021. Meanwhile, people living with EDS are often misdiagnosed, and some of the secondary conditions caused by the illness are not currently treated by the NHS – like atlantoaxial instability. However, medical professionals often treat both these conditions as psychological – that somehow, people are making their illnesses up.

    As the Canary previously wrote of ME:

    People living with it have for decades been disbelieved, stigmatised, given incorrect treatment, or told it’s ‘all in their heads’. Much of this comes from the now-discredited PACE trial… It found that people could recover from the disease by having cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). In other words, people living with a very-real, viral-based illness should just ‘think themselves better’. Essentially, the trial pushed the notion that the disease was part-psychosomatic or ‘made up’ by patients. But the trial’s findings haven’t held up, with its proponents accused by some of scientific fraud and causing potentially the “biggest medical scandal of the 21st century”.

    It’s a similar story for EDS. As the Canary previously wrote:

    The story of Antonia Payne-Cheney, whose mother I interviewed at length, is one example. Medical professionals disbelieved Antonia [who lives with EDS], branded her a “drug seeker” and said her mother was making her illnesses up. All of this was simply not the case. Part of this is down to professional ignorance. Some of it is due to the PACE trial’s findings also being applied to EDS. And some of it is down to the NHS not even recognising many of EDS’s cluster syndromes.

    Sami may well be facing prejudice and disbelief based on both these illnesses.

    Fighting for Sami – and every chronically ill person

    Sami’s condition is clearly critical. She desperately needs an intervention from an external party – be that a charity, advocate, politician or other medical professionals. This needs to get her the specialist treatment her conditions warrant. Whether or not that happens remains to be seen. If you wish to support Sami, you can contact ME Action here.

    However, the broader picture is that her situation is far from unusual. Doctors all too often neglect chronically ill and disabled patients. Research often misses vital clues to pathology. Worse, some research makes life for the people affected even harder. Moreover, the crossovers and links between these various conditions are sorely under-researched.

    Until the medical profession banishes psychologisation, organisations spend more money on research, and governments and healthcare providers invest more in treatments, Sami and others will continue to suffer on the NHS’s watch. Everyone involved in ME and EDS must work together to ensure that no one goes through what Sami currently is, ever again.

    Featured image via ME Action UK

    By Steve Topple

    This post was originally published on Canary.