Speculators profit from Covid-19 crisis
I am a care worker for people with long term complex mental health needs. Many of the people I visit in the community on a daily basis are in the High-Risk category for Covid-19. We are often in close contact with people, cooking, cleaning, washing feet and fingernails, changing beds, laundering clothes. Thankfully we already had some supplies of gloves and aprons, but we have been unable to order liquid soap or hand sanitiser from our usual suppliers – it’s been on order for weeks whilst the company we use for housing repairs has gone into liquidation.
We are a voluntary sector organisation directly contracted by Newcastle city council to provide adult social care, the council have done nothing to support us or distribute protective equipment. Staff have been scouring the shops to buy any kind of soap. In desperation, my manager spent £45 on two 500ml bottles of hand sanitiser on eBay! Yet I received an email from ‘cheapestprintonline.co.uk’ offering a free 30ml bottle of hand sanitiser if I bought a bigger bottle at inflated prices. The mask has been ripped off, as always, the profit motive triumphs whilst we are thrown under a bus.
Jenny Mitchell
Newcastle upon Tyne
Support the hunger strikes of Grup Yorum and Mustafa Koçak!
Grup Yorum musicians İbrahim Gökçek, Helin Bölek and the political prisoner Mustafa Koçak are on a death fast*. They demand Freedom and Justice!
*death fast is a higher level of indefinite hunger strike, which continues until the definite acceptance of demands
Grup Yorum is an organisation of artists for the People in Turkey. The band is very popular in Turkey and abroad. Over the years Grup Yorum have played in front of thousands of people in cities across Turkey and across the world. Their popularity, revolutionary songs and committed concerts provoked the repression of the regime of Erdoğan which criminalised them and called them terrorists.
The members of Grup Yorum are on hunger strike for their rights to expression and to oppose the repression that is taking place against them and their supporters in Turkey and abroad. Their rights are the rights of the oppressed people in Turkey and all over the world.
Members of the group are demanding:
- An end to the police raids against the Cultural Centre İdil. The Cultural Centre is constantly raided in an attempt to intimidate the masses in the place where Grup Yorum works.
- The removal of Grup Yorum members from the list of persons wanted by the Ministry.
- The removal of the ban on Grup Yorum concerts, all of which have been banned for almost three years.
- The cessation of the charges against the members of Grup Yorum.
- The release of all members of Grup Yorum.
Force feeding is torture!
End force feeding!
End the torture!
Accept hunger strikers’ demands!
CINEAD
Anti-Internment Group
Famine and plague
Although many commentators are making comparisons between the present virus crisis and the spread of plague in history, the most significant comparison is with the Irish famines of the 1840s. Like the coronavirus, the potato blight that led to the Irish famines, is a natural phenomenon. Potato Blight is caused by the Phytophthora infestans fungus and spreads via airborne spores on the wind until it lands on a susceptible plant and the weather conditions are right for it to develop. Potato was the staple diet of the Irish people, including the peasantry who farmed the land of the great English estates and of the urban workers crowded into the slums and docks of Dublin.
In one year alone, 1 million Irish emigrated and 1.5 million died from starvation. The island of Ireland had warehouses full of other food products, dairy, meat, vegetables all for export to England and the world’s markets. The British government would not release these supplies to relieve the famine of the Irish. Today, similarly, protective clothing, respirators and sanitising products are either stored in the world’s warehouses or could be rapidly produced by the world’s factories to ameliorate the impact of the virus. It is the stranglehold of the profit motive that holds all this back. In a world of plenty, millions are already dying of diseases. Capitalism has run its historic course. It is time to end it and replace it with socialism.
SUSAN DAVIDSON
Holding ‘Glasgow Life’ to account
After almost two years of writing feedback/complaint forms and asking for acknowledgement of my feedback, Glasgow Life, the ‘charity’ which runs Glasgow libraries and community centres, has finally agreed to move the prison diary of Irish revolutionary Bobby Sands ‘One Day In My Life’ out of the ‘True Crime’ section of my local library, where it sat beside books about mafia mobsters and serial killers, and into the ‘Politics and Government’ section where it will sit beside books by and about other notable political figures. A small victory in what Fidel Castro called ‘the Battle of Ideas’.
Meanwhile, a public organising meeting of the Zionism Is Racism (ZIR) coalition which was to take place on 5 March in Govanhill Neighbourhood Centre was cancelled at short notice by Glasgow Life citing concerns over the ‘group’s name’. ZIR supporters are demanding to know in writing if the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism, which has been adopted by Glasgow City Council, has been used and will challenge any censorship of solidarity with Palestine. For updates see Facebook ‘Glasgow FRFI’ and ‘Zionism is Racism – Scotland Stand Up!’
DOMINIC
Glasgow
Racist exploitation not a thing of the past
A special £2 coin commemorating ‘An Act For The Abolition Of The Slave Trade’ in 1807 made its way into my purse recently. With the knowledge that people in immigration detention centres across Britain are being paid £1 an hour to work inside their own prisons (that’s less than the coin itself is worth!), I feel I must point out the hypocrisy of our government preying on the heavily racialised labour of immigrants driven from their homes due to imperialist war and poverty, while patting itself on the back for the formal end of slavery.
In March 2018 the High Court ruled it was legal to pay people £1 an hour inside detention centres. The exploitation of racialised groups is not a just an idea that a horrid politician had, it’s a political and economic tool necessary to the growth of capitalism, and its ugly presence is still ingrained in our society despite slavery, a form of racialised exploitation, being abolished. Serco was recently given a £200 million grant from The Home Office to run two immigration detention centres in London, Brooke House and Tinsley House.
This exploitation and violation of human rights will not end without an active, organised resistance which recognises that racism’s roots are in capitalist exploitation. People have to get active in fighting for a better world.
HEIDI GRACE
Nottingham
FRFI’s Brexit analysis
Thank you for the latest copy of FRFI. I have read your articles about: the fallout from Brexit in your country: the choices of the two sections of the British bourgeoisie – those who are pro-European Union or pro-United States; its future decline in the world and among the capitalist powers; the impact on British society and its classes and nations and other aspects of the issue. These are the things I look for in your paper and I know I will always get answers and many elements of the picture.
As far as possible, I also try to understand the consequences of Brexit outside your country, in Europe for example, and particularly in Italy. Now I’m off to read the rest of the paper…
Greetings,
STEFANO
Alessandria, Italy
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 275, March/April 2020
