Europe’s New Pact on Migration and Asylum:

More deadly border politics

by Niamh Ní Bhriain

Recent years have seen the consolidation and expansion of Fortress Europe, a set of policies and practices designed to keep refugees out of the EU at any cost. Niamh Ní Bhriain explains how the European Commission’s New Pact on Migration and Asylum, introduced under the cover of COVID, is set to exacerbate what is already a humanitarian catastrophe.

On 23 September the European Commission published its New Pact on Migration and Asylum, which it claims will offer “a fresh start on migration” and bring a “striking new balance between responsibility and solidarity”. Although this Pact had been in the pipeline since 2019, its publication comes only weeks after Moria Refugee Camp, on the Greek island of Lesbos, was burned to the ground leaving over 12,000 people without shelter. Moria – not so much a camp but a squalid, overcrowded, open air prison – is one of the many tangible examples of how deeply inhumane European border and migration policies have become.

Far from offering a fresh start by addressing the most problematic aspects of Europe’s approach to migration, this Pact entrenches those very policies. Its focus on containment and deterrence will likely lead to more inhumane camps, force those on the move to take even more treacherous migration routes, and ultimately lead to more deaths at the hands of European policy makers.

Expanding the Fortress

Although following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the EU began unrestricted movement within its borders under the terms of the Schengen Agreement, externally it developed policies that focused on controlling external migration routes, expanding sophisticated surveillance technology, and increasing deportations and pushbacks. 

Since 1992, and more aggressively since 2005, the EU, and its member states have pursued policies that externalise European border control as far South as Senegal and as far East as Azerbaijan. Border externalisation aims to prevent forcibly displaced people from ever reaching Europe’s shores. It is a policy whereby people on the move are contained, often in unsafe third countries, where they are not afforded international protection and are frequently subjected to torture. They cannot advance to safety but equally they cannot go home – they are stuck. 

The Global Approach to Migration and Mobility published in November 2011, cited the Arab Spring uprisings and unrest in the Southern Mediterranean as the impetus for the EU to engage third countries in developing securitised border policies. Migration was framed as a threat to the stability of Europe and cooperation agreements were put in place with countries of origin and transit to stop people advancing towards Europe. In effect, these third countries became Europe’s border guards.

Both the 2015 Valletta Summit on Migration, which brought together European and African heads of state, and the 2016 European Commission’s Partnership Framework on Migration, deployed a carrot and stick approach, offering “positive” incentives in the form of military funding, training and equipment, but equally threatening negative consequences should third countries choose not to play ball. Those in Europe’s corridors of power carved out agreements where they called the shots on border control in third countries, significantly undermining the sovereignty of those nation states, prolonging colonial dynamics, and reinforcing an uneven and oppressive system of power. Under a myriad of bilateral and multilateral agreements, security forces representing various European nations, as well as Europe’s Borders and Coast Guard Agency, Frontex, were deployed to third countries to patrol their borders and train and equip their border guards.

Europe has built a fortress around itself and in so doing, has simultaneously propped up authoritarian governments and militia groups in the Middle East and North Africa, undermining democracy, and provoking unrest and mass displacement. The ongoing instability in Libya offers a case in point.

Forced returns and pushbacks

As well as building up Fortress Europe, much effort has gone in to increasing returns, often considered the magic bullet to forcibly remove from Europe those who have managed to penetrate its complex external border apparatus. Under the Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund 2014-20, EU member states were allocated in excess of €800 million for return operations.

Europe’s obsession with keeping people out at all costs is perhaps most clearly observed in its pushback of boats arriving to its shores. The EU and its member states have unashamedly withdrawn search and rescue missions from the Mediterranean in recent years while simultaneously criminalising civil society initiatives to save lives at sea.

Since the beginning of 2020, video footage has emerged of the Greek coastguard deliberately sabotaging overcrowded boats in distress, colliding with them, shooting towards them, and literally prodding them with sticks to push them back to Turkish waters. In the central Mediterranean, the EU and its member states provide funding, training and equipment to the Libyan coastguard to tow people back to Libya where they will be arbitrarily detained in squalid facilities notorious for torture.

The onset of COVID-19 saw European governments double down on border securitisation policies making borders even deadlier than before. Italy and Malta closed their ports and knowingly left boats adrift allowing people to die at sea. In one case, a rubber dinghy carrying 63 people was left adrift for a week. Twelve people died of dehydration and drowning and those who survived were forcibly towed back to Libya and placed in a detention centre in Tripoli. Various European national coastguards and Frontex were alerted to the boat in distress but failed to intervene. 

Although European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, speaks of taking “a human and humane approach” stating that “saving lives at sea is not optional”, such words ring hollow when so many thousands of lives have been lost in the Mediterranean Sea. At least six people die each day trying to cross the Mediterranean, although there are likely many more unknown deaths – a reality that is all the more harrowing when you consider that in 2019 Frontex carried out 592 maritime aerial surveillance flights. The Mediterranean is clearly being surveilled although not with the objective of saving lives, but rather to force those fleeing violence and armed conflict back to unsafe third countries, or failing that, leaving them to drown.

There is a sustained and concerted effort by European leaders to keep people from exercising their legitimate right to seek asylum at any cost, and far too often they pay the ultimate price with their lives. European leaders have blood on their hands but have yet to be held to account for putting in place policies that knowingly cause people to die at sea.

The New Pact: More deadly border politics

The European Commission is proposing pre-entry screening for all “irregular arrivals” whereby they will be held for five days in an external facility, undergo health and security checks and their personal data, including fingerprints, will be registered in the EURODAC database. The screening aims to “accelerate the process of determining the status of a person and what type of procedure should apply”: an asylum procedure or a swift return. Pre-entry screening aims to filter out “asylum claims with low chances of being accepted … presented by applicants misleading the authorities, originating from countries with low recognition rates likely not to be in need of protection, or posing a threat to national security”.

The screening process raises a number of concerns. People are deprived of their liberty, placed in external facilities operated by an EU member state, but have not been admitted to the EU – so which jurisdiction are they in and which legal code applies? This is not clear. There is no envisaged judicial review of the decision taken following pre-entry screening, nor is it clear whether those in screening facilities will have access to independent legal advice or representation. 

Furthermore, “Member States will also need to carry out the screening if a person eludes border controls but is later identified within the territory of a Member State”. In theory then, could someone who is living undocumented in the EU for many years be referred for screening and deported within five days if they fail to meet the threshold of having a “well-founded” asylum claim? 

Seeking international protection is nuanced and hugely complex. Those displaced by violence or armed conflict arriving at Europe’s external borders are often deeply traumatised and disorientated and in urgent need of humanitarian assistance. They need independent legal advice to best engage with the asylum process and articulate their reasons for fleeing. How likely is it that someone fleeing violence will adequately articulate their reasons for seeking asylum within this five-day period and without legal accompaniment?

Pre-entry screening seems not so concerned with providing vital humanitarian assistance or avenues to seek asylum, but rather with sifting through those arriving as quickly as possible to fast-track return as many asylum applicants as possible. Considering Europe’s track record in pushing back and forcibly returning migrants – many of whom have strong cases – the implementation of pre-entry screening suggests that even more applicants will likely be kept out. This system will force those on the move to take even more dangerous migration routes than before to circumvent being filtered out, but will do nothing to address the root causes of why they are fleeing in the first place.

As part of the “common framework for solidarity and responsibility sharing”, which will “primarily focus on relocation or return sponsorship”, EU member states will be able to choose whether they want to receive those who have been permitted entry or to financially support the return of those who are to be removed. EU member states have been given a green light to forego their collective obligation to uphold the right to seek asylum and partake in deportations as an alternative. If a state doesn’t want to welcome people, it can pay to expel them instead – writing this into policy is a new low for Europe.  Should all or the majority of member states decide to shirk their responsibility in receiving asylum applicants and opt for the “return sponsorship” mechanism, we will likely end up with an asylum procedure that looks exactly the same as what we’ve already got, only with a greater number of forced returns. Although EU Commissioner Johansson said there would be “no more Morias”, under this New Pact, it’s difficult to see how we won’t end up with multiple Morias dotted around Europe’s external borders where would-be asylum seekers will be treated as criminals and forcibly removed.

Continued militarisation

The New Pact tasks Frontex with playing “a leading role in the common EU system for returns”. Since its formation, Frontex has repeatedly seen its mandate expand and its budget increase. In 2019 Frontex was involved in returning 15,850 people from Europe. This year has seen the transformation of Frontex into the EU’s first uniformed service, with a recruitment drive for an armed standing corps, mandated to take executive decisions regarding Europe’s external borders. Does the unabated expanse of Frontex in to an armed, uniformed force, deployed to Europe’s external borders and third countries, with an autonomous mandate and executive powers, not make it a European army in all but name?

Border policies will continue to be militarised and the border security industry will continue to reap the benefits of a global market worth in excess of US$17 billion. This for-profit model will continue to drive the narrative that migration is a security threat and requires a securitized solution. The Pact will serve as a policy anchor for the EU’s Multi-annual Financial Framework 2021-2027 adopted last July, which included an expanded budget for Frontex, an Integrated Border Management Fund, and an Asylum and Migration Fund.

The Pact promises that the “EU will strengthen cooperation with countries of origin and transit to prevent dangerous journeys and irregular crossings”. In essence, this is an entrenchment of externalisation policies that have thus far done nothing to stem the flow of migration, but rather forced those on the move to embark on ever more treacherous routes or ensure that they get stuck along the way.

Although the Pact recognises the need for independent monitors and discourages the criminalisation of migrant solidarity, such measures are a drop in the ocean when held up against all the is so fundamentally wrong with Europe’s border and migration policies. 

Containment and deterrence

European border policies do not work. They do not work for EU member states, particularly those on Europe’s external borders; they do not work for countries of origin and transit which have been consistently destabilised by European intervention; and they do not work for those on the receiving end of these policies who are subjected to torture, disappeared or killed. European policies focus on containment and deterrence. They reduce accountability for the EU and its member states, shift responsibility to third countries, and outsource border guards, procedures and controls to a border security industry profiting from a political and humanitarian crisis. They completely miss the point about why people are on the move in the first place. People move to survive – you cannot contain or deter survival and European attempts to do so thus far have had devastating consequences. This New Pact shows just how deeply at odds European thinking really is with what is actually needed to alleviate the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe at Europe’s borders. Under this Pact that situation can only get worse.

Niamh Ní Bhriain coordinates the Transnational Institute (TNI)’s War and Pacification Programme, which focuses on the permanent state of war and pacification of resistance. Twitter: @DondeNiamh. Read more about the expansion of Fortress Europe in this TNI report.

There’s no such thing as ‘The Science’, just science

by Paddy Bettington

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the relationship between science, ideology and politics has moved centre stage. Paddy Bettington traces the Tory government’s use and abuse of scientific opinion, and how this has fed into a wider ideological battle across British society.

‘People in this country have had enough of experts’, pronounced Michael Gove four years ago, in place of an answer as to why Brexit would not be the economic disaster that economic models were predicting. No doubt in response to the growing acceptance of such a sentiment, last summer the comedian Ricky Gervais tweeted, ‘The world began to crumble when feelings started overruling facts’. Here, in the throwaway comments of two equally galling public figures, we see a microcosm of what Horkheimer and Adorno termed, the dialectic of enlightenment; two absolutist positions that have come to define our politics.

Collections of knowledge coalesce into a single mythology – be it religion or political ideology – which subsumes and warps further understanding, blinding its adherents to reason and independent thinking. The reaction against this force is enlightenment, the rejection of dogma and the encouragement of reasoned, analytical thought. However, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, we became so enthralled by the language and logic of reason, that it, in turn, became myth. Science or economics are treated by some as sacred as God once was. Reason became instrumentalised; we began to use it as a means to optimally achieve given ends but stopped using it to consider, determine or challenge what those ends should be. In their eyes, this development – the use of reason, logic and science as tools, without questioning the purpose of one’s task – facilitated the Holocaust. To summarise their view in Gervais’ terms, the world began to crumble when facts started overruling feelings.

The two extremes of this dialectic epitomise political discourse over much of the world over the past five years but, it has been particularly visible in the UK across the Brexit debate. On one side, informed heavily by Johnson’s now chief aide Dominic Cummings, we saw the outright rejection of expertise in favour of faith in abstract notions of sovereignty and British exceptionalism. On the other, an irrational fetishisation of the rational; economic modelling consistently held up as fact and the continual privileging of monetary values over millions of people’s negative experiences of living within the EU.

The results of this ranged between inefficacy and farce. Remain activist Femi Oluwole trying to catch Tory MP Mark Francois – a man who openly rejects the primacy of reason over belief – in a logical trap. An interview between Andrew Marr and Arron Banks after which Europhiles and Eurosceptics both took to Twitter to pronounce on how the exchange evidently validated their views. Or, James O’Brien having the self-defeating arrogance to publish his book How to be Right in a World Gone Wrong, seemingly oblivious to the reality that while right and wrong are subjective, his LBC counterpart Nigel Farage is objectively the victor in achieving his stated aims.

The pandemic begins

And so, in 2020, with the Brexit debate pushed to the background, it is this backdrop – a bifurcation of society which has pitted rationality against feeling and led each half to reject the very form of the others argument – against which we were suddenly exposed to a global pandemic that produced crises of both science and politics.

It is difficult to say with certainty what the most prominent driver during the Government’s initial response was; the absolute dominance of economic logic, or the willingness to dismiss establishment experts that had proven successful in a referendum and a landslide election. That said, in 2016, ‘post-truth’ was Oxford Dictionaries word of the year. The turn towards post-truth politics has been met with liberal commentators content with cleverly pointing out what they see as idiocy, rather than trying to understand the phenomenon as a failure of reason. It is implausible to think that the above context did not hinder the authority of medical science going into the pandemic.

In a now-infamous interview on popular daytime TV show This Morning, Johnson’s statement that ‘one of the theories’, was to ‘allow the disease to move through the population’, smacked of Cummings’ penchant for unorthodoxy. Being neither young nor cool enough to work for a tech start-up, Cummings seems intent on running the country as if it were one. However, the effects of moving fast and breaking things, when applied to the lives of people’s loved ones, would soon become politically untenable. 

Over the coming weeks, Johnson stuck with the tactic of unorthodoxy intended to imply courage, greatness, exceptionalism. Yet the death toll continued to climb, data analysis – particularly that of the Financial Times – made it apparent to everyone that the UK was charting a similar path to Italy, and the nation began to lock themselves down – despite the reckless advice from their Prime Minister. 

The return of ‘The Science’

Finally, on 23 March the Government bowed to the inevitable and gave explicit instructions for the country to go into lockdown. But Johnson’s rhetoric was designed to make clear to the public that the decisions being taken – running in stark opposition to whatever semblance of an ideology he has – were not being made by him and his cabinet, but by ‘The Science’.

There is, of course, no such thing as The Science; there is science. Within it lies a multitude of competing ideas, almost none of which are unanimously agreed upon. The Government knows this. Advice published by SAGE – The UK Government’s scientific advisory group – is littered with caveats and expressions of uncertainty. SAGE’s early advisory documents typically provide a list of potential interventions, a range of possible outcomes and a summary of sometimes contradictory suggestions. The tone of some documents becomes decidedly strained and frustrated, one noting they have ‘pointed out repeatedly that trust will be lost in sections of the public if measures witnessed in other countries are not adopted in the UK’. Ultimately though, as one report explicitly states, ‘It is a political decision to consider whether it is preferable to enact stricter measures.’

This ambiguity is not a failure of science; it is an honest representation on the part of SAGE that all modelling is a simplification of the real world, that within theirs are unconfirmed assumptions and unknown variables, and that other considerations – economic, social, political – are significant but sit outside their remit and fields of expertise. Faced with such complexity and uncertainty, we have to remember that members of SAGE are not democratically elected officials, so are in no position to take life-shattering, historic decisions that impact the entire nation.

Nevertheless, watching any government press appearance in the weeks following the commencement of lockdown would suggest a memo had been circulated with Government forbidding the use of the word science if not directly preceded by the definite article. The daily press conferences now featured a rolling cast of Tory MPs symbolically flanked by a scientist on either side. ‘Following The Science’ became the Government’s catchphrase and central defence against whatever modicum of scrutiny the media could muster.

Guided by the continual pursuit of power, and accustomed to governance by public relations, Cummings and Johnson calculated to present themselves as powerless to an external force. British exceptionalism, a stiff-upper-lip and some out-the-box thinking had allowed the UK to keep our shops, schools and offices open for longer than our European counterparts, but once the death toll rose, it was the ‘unprecedented’ situation and ‘The Science’ that forced the closing of the economy and the massive state interventions that were so at odds to Conservative values.

In terms of political power, not human life, the strategy proved largely successful for Johnson. The Tories’ approval rating surged to 52% at the beginning of lockdown and held at 49% into May. This surge coincided with an inevitable focus on the importance of public health: the portion of the public listing Health as one of their three most important issues jumped from 41% to 75% in four weeks, far outstripping the economy at 45%.

A test of vision

For six weeks, the instructions to the UK public we’re reasonably clear: ‘Stay at Home’. In the second week of May, as right-wing commentators’ moralising judgements of the public gave way to their instinct to protect capital, Johnson announced a series of relaxations to lockdown measures accompanied by a new, anything-but-clear slogan: ‘Stay Alert’. Yet even as the innate marketism of the Conservative Party began to re-emerge, and the struggle between wealth and health became visible, Johnson attempted to maintain an apolitical veil of science over the decision-making process. He introduced a system of ‘COVID alert levels’ which, along with their accompanying infographics, were received for the patronising pseudo-science they were. The most laughable component, an image tweeted by Johnson, revealed the supposed formula that would be used to calculate the current alert level:

COVID alert level = R (rate of infection) + number of infections.

Data later published by the Office for National Statistics show that at the time, on a scale of 1 to 5, the UK’s COVID alert level was somewhere between 62,000 and 250,000.

But polling showed no clear public support for relaxing lockdown measures and Government approval ratings started to drop significantly. Whether purposeful or an emergent result of conflicting interests, the confusing messaging no doubt appeased aspects of his conservative instincts and supporters by beginning to open up the economy. However, rather than taking ownership of a challenging, intractable political decision, this turn towards business-as-usual was performed whilst hiding behind a thin façade of science, all the while letting a significant amount of press attention – and at times public scorn – be deflected on to the scientific advisors around him.

Only days later, politics returned abruptly to our screens when it was reported that Dominic Cummings had broken lockdown rules by travelling from London to Durham while likely infected with Covid-19, before driving to a castle for a birthday-celebration-cum-eye-test. After days of calls for his resignation, with even the right-wing press becoming critical of cummings, Johnson was forced to re-acknowledge the distinction between politics and science when he repeatedly refused to let his scientific advisors answer journalist’s questions on the matter.

On 25 May, the Prime Minister’s absurdist tendencies shone through when, after his own attempts to ‘draw a line under the issue’ failed, he offered up No. 10’s rose garden to his aide, from whence Cummings proffered a full admission of his transgressions, but embellished with irrelevant and unconvincing details. This performance served only to fuel interest in the story and so to distract from it – or possibly to legitimate it – two days later, an aggressive drive towards normality began. Johnson announced that tomorrow an unfinished track-and-trace system would be rushed to launch and the final #ClapForOurCarers event would take place. The following day, Rishi Sunak announced the winding down of the job retention scheme. By 2 June there were announcements that some competitive sports would restart, outdoor markets, car showrooms and sports facilities would open; Tory MPs were widely reported to be lobbying for a reduction of the 2m social distancing rule; and, MP’s voted to return to Parliament.

The economy strikes back

By the beginning of June, it was clear that the Conservative ideologies temporarily set aside for the sake of public health – or to stem the outcry at the UK having the second-highest death rate in the world – had regained their primacy. We now began to see a visible rift in Government as the scientists, who had a public platform hoisted on them just weeks earlier, used it to warn against such a rapid easing of lockdown. Approval ratings had, by this point, returned the low 30s from which Johnson still comfortably won an election. Most importantly for Johnson, by mid-June, the numbers citing health as their most important issue, versus those opting for the economy had met in the middle at 60% and have mirrored each other ever since. 

When the UK’s alert level was lowered from 4 to 3 on 19 June, it was with none of the transparency purported at the system’s initial introduction. While it is unclear precisely what triggered the change, it is clear that despite protestations and reports of advisors being silenced, just four days after it was lowered, a consultation had been completed drawing the expected conclusion that it was now safe to reduce social distancing measures to 1m. On the same day, Johnson gave the final daily press briefing, and two days later on 25 June, it was announced that pubs and restaurants could re-open. For most people, this marked the point at which lockdown effectively ended, with the Government actively encouraging people to leave their homes soon after.

Restoring balance

This story is undoubtedly one of a Government willing to abuse science; to dismiss it when it goes against their aims, to use it as cover from political flack, and then discard and suppress it when economic ideals dictate. But there was a critical prequel, co-starring an equal and opposite force that facilitated this behaviour; an evangelical rationalism so impenetrable to any language but logic that it left those that opposed its conclusions little choice but to reject it wholesale.

More recent events offer us a glimpse into the far-reaching contemporary consequences of not grappling with then relationship between politics and science: The chaos ensuing from Scotland’s and England’s algorithmically determined A-level results,  the Home Office’s climbdown on the use of a biased algorithm to process visa applications, or the steadily growing ‘anti-vaxxer’ movement.

Science is fallible and contestable. By treating it with absolutism, we bestow on it unwarranted qualities of rigidity and opacity which allow it to be both pushed aside and hidden behind. This crisis has made all too clear how vital ‘hard’ sciences are to our very survival. But, it should also show us the importance of presenting sciences honestly and transparently, as imperfect tools which merely assist us in much more challenging political determinations.

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Paddy is a PhD researcher at the University of East Anglia, focusing on our relationship with work, employment and technology. He is also a member of the 4 Day Week campaign group. 

A municipalist response to COVID-19

by Kate Shea Baird

Much commentary on the pandemic has focused on the interventions of central states in the areas of public health and the economy. But what of the responses of municipal governments? Kate Shea Baird explains how Ada Colau’s administration in Barcelona has sought to meet the challenge of COVID in a way that tackles inequalities and promotes climate action.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been met by unprecedented state intervention around the world. We’ve seen lockdowns, travel bans, quarantines and state-funded furloughs instigated in an attempt to deal with both the virus and its economic consequences. In many countries, these interventions have been accompanied by the centralisation of decision-making at national level, often through the use of emergency powers.

But top-down measures can only take us so far in a health crisis that has exposed and deepened festering economic, gender and racial inequalities in Europe. In contrast to their remote, often out-of-touch national counterparts, local governments can target resources to where they are most needed and detect and respond to people’s priorities.

The case of Barcelona, governed by Barcelona En Comú under the mayoralty of former housing activist Ada Colau, is an example of how one the most progressive municipal governments in Europe is responding to the intersecting crises of COVID-19, economic recession and climate breakdown.

Health and economic justice

Barcelona has been hard-hit by the pandemic, in terms of both health and the economy. But this impact hasn’t been evenly distributed across the city: the poorest residents of Barcelona have been hardest hit by the coronavirus.  According to a study by the Hospital del Mar and IDIAPGol, infection rates in the working-class district of Nou Barris are 2.5 times those in the wealthiest district, Sarrià-Sant Gervasi. Structural sexism and racism have also played their hand in exposing different parts of the population. Women have been more likely to lose income and take on increased caring responsibilities than men, and made up 70% of social service users in Barcelona during lockdown. Women have also had to contend with an increased risk of gender violence; calls to Spain’s gender violence helpline rose by 60% in Spain during the first month of lockdown. For their part, immigrants are more likely to live in overcrowded, unsafe housing and work in low-paid sectors with temporary contracts, and those without legal status are ineligible for support from national social programmes.

Barcelona’s response has focused on ameliorating these class, gender and racial inequalities, with the city doubling spending on social services since March and announcing a €90 million emergency fund to deal with the social and economic impact of the pandemic.

One of the municipal government’s priorities has focused on guaranteeing the right to housing: the city set up 750 additional beds for the homeless during lockdown, as well as freezing rent payments for residents of public housing. Colau also reached a deal to mobilise 200 unused tourist apartments to house people in need of emergency housing, including those unable self-isolate in their own homes and women escaping abusive partners.Barcelona also continued with its policy of fining the owners of empty apartments, and expropriating them. In June, the city announced a case against the vulture fund Azora for failing to rent 20 of its properties, and in July it warned fourteen other companies that it would begin expropriation proceedings if they didn’t fill 194 apartments within the month.

To deal with the gendered impact of the pandemic, Barcelona has created a pilot municipal babysitting service in six low-income neighbourhoods to support women to work or study. The city has also announced 150,000 euros of funding for projects to tackle the feminization of poverty. Unusually for this kind of public funding, informal groups and individuals can present projects, as well as traditional NGOs, making it much more open and accessible to non-traditional providers who are rooted in local communities.

No-one is illegal

The situation of undocumented immigrants in Barcelona is particularly critical; before the pandemic, many scraped a living in the informal underbelly of the city’s tourist economy. Barcelona has co-led the ‘registration means rights’ (padró són drets) campaign, calling on all municipal governments to follow its lead in actively registering undocumented migrants as official residents. This policy enables people without papers in Barcelona to access a range of housing, health and education services that they would otherwise be denied.

Perhaps the only positive effect of COVID-19 on immigrants was the closure of all of Spain’s immigrant detention centres in May, something that Barcelona had long called for. In June, Colau joined the Mayor of Valencia, Joan Ribó in writing to the Spanish government and calling for the closure to be made permanent. They wrote that‘No-one is illegal and being a migrant is not a crime … These months of temporary closure have proven that these centres aren’t necessary to control migration.’

Greening the city

It’s estimated that CO₂ emissions in Barcelona fell by 290,840 tonnes during lockdown, the level of reduction necessary if the city is to meet its goal of a 50% emissions reduction by 2030. The city council has taken advantage of the opportunity to accelerate existing policies to rewild the city, reduce the amount of public space dedicated to private vehicles, and extend cycling and walking infrastructure.

Barcelona is a relatively grey, concrete city; in 2017 it had an average of just 7m² of green space per resident, a figure that fell to 1.85m² in the central Eixample district. Over recent years, the city council has implemented an active rewilding policy, and lockdown gave the city’s incipient plant life the boost it needed to flourish like never before, with some of the city’s green spaces becoming virtually unrecognisable refuges from their concrete surroundings.

At the same time, Barcelona has used ‘tactical urbanism’ (provisional, low-cost interventions in public space) to pedestrianise 12km of public space and create 21km of new cycle lanes. These policies serve the dual purpose of facilitating COVID-safe, physically distanced travel during the health crisis, as well as supporting Colau’s long-term goal of reducing car use and carbon emissions.

Crucially, Barcelona’s green policies have a class perspective. At a time when many seek to juxtapose the climate and economic crises, Colau’s government sees the two as inextricable. A small, but illustrative, example is how Barcelona has negotiated the use of public space between pedestrians and bars and restaurants. In a context where the hospitality industry is struggling, and too often pedestrians are pitted against bar owners for the use of space in streets and squares, Colau gave bars and restaurants permission to put extra tables in lanes usually used by cars. In this way, she protected pedestrian space as well as the jobs in the hospitality sector.

Culture and care

Too many governments have treated care and cultural work as expendable during the COVID-19 crisis. This has not been the case in Barcelona. One of the first measures announced by the city council, way back in March, was a set of ten initiatives to support the city’s cultural sector. These included €1 million of special funding for grassroots cultural organizations such as small theatres, workshops and cultural cooperatives, another million for new books for public libraries, advance payments for cultural workers with existing contracts with city hall, and funding to support the sector to make theatres, bookshops, galleries, etc. COVID-secure. In July, the city announced a cultural voucher scheme, through which it would subsidise 25% of purchasers’ spending in local bookshops, theatres, concert halls and cinemas.

The city has also taken a holistic, community-based approach to health and wellbeing. Understanding that the health impact of COVID goes way beyond the virus itself, Barcelona has invested €1.5 million in dealing with the mental health impact of COVID and lockdown on the population, including a new telephone helpline for those needing emotional support. The city council has also led projects to bring citizens together online to process the experience of the pandemic emotionally and creatively, including the ‘dear diary’ initiative for children and ‘Barcelona remembers’, an online space for residents to share memories and experiences, as well as a crowdsourced digital historical archive, of documents, photos and videos.

In addition, Barcelona has identified the importance of strengthening grassroots community initiatives beyond city hall. Around the world, people have been looking out for one another through local mutual aid networks, social movements and neighbourhood organisations, and in Barcelona the city council has turned 30 municipal buildings into community hubs, providing local groups with storage and meeting spaces, PPE, videoconferencing and mobile technology, printing facilities, transport services and more.

The fight for municipal autonomy

Of course, all of this socially oriented municipal action comes at a cost. Barcelona is facing a €300 million budget deficit, due to falling tax revenues and increased social spending in the wake of the pandemic. This, in a context where post-2008 austerity legislation in Spain doesn’t allow local governments to keep any savings they make, let alone to run a deficit. After months calling on the Spanish Prime Minister to support local finances to no avail, Colau is leading a municipal rebellion, and refusing to hand over Barcelona’s 2019 budget surplus of €161 million to the central government.

For too long, local governments in Spain have been patronised and undermined by arrogant central governments of all colours. Yet, historically, municipalities have been at the vanguard of driving social, economic and cultural progress in the country. It’s no coincidence that the Second Republic was declared after republican forces swept to power in local elections in 1931. If the coalition government between the Socialist Party and Podemos is to survive and thrive, it must recognise municipalities as an indispensable ally in the construction of a post-COVID Spain, and finance them accordingly.

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Kate Shea Baird works as an advisor to the political coalition En Comú Guanyem at Barcelona’s regional government.  Some of Kate’s writings on radical municipalism can be found at her blog site: https://katesheabaird.wordpress.com/. Twitter: @KateSB.

State and workers’ power in the Irish city-state

The recent ruling of the EU’s General Court in favour of Apple and the Irish state has led to a renewed discussion around the future of Ireland’s tax haven status. Michael Rafferty argues that Ireland’s low-tax arrangements form one part of a new ‘relational’ economy centred on Dublin’s financial/professional/tech industries and the new, atomised labour market patterns it engenders. This raises important challenges and opportunities for the institutional left.

by Michael Rafferty

Irish neoliberalism is on the up. It almost always is. And the current version, a new government with a seat on the UN Security Council, the presidency of the Eurogroup and an historic civil war axe-burying ‘green’ makeover, is strutting its stuff on the international stage. The stern rebuke given by Irish voters in February on the very real negative impacts of the post-Tiger growth model is now a distant memory amid the international plaudits for marginally more decisive action than the UK and USA on coronavirus. Come what may, the tax-haven configuration centred around its multinational corporate clients in Dublin’s docklands, its financiers and property tycoons, is sacrosanct. All imaginable alternatives occur within this narrow window; even the previously unimaginable implications of a global pandemic do not threaten it. There is simply no conceivable deviation from the trajectory which began in 1987 with the Irish government’s conversion of Dublin Corporation land – which, in poetic irony, was earmarked for public housing – into the fiscal vacuum of what is now the IFSC.

Upsetting the Apple cart

The economic hubris displayed following the tentative outcome of the Apple corporate taxation case belies a flimsy legal framework for the Irish tax-haven, and falls flat in an increasingly inhospitable global political environment for tax avoidance. The ‘Single Malt’ was the corporate response tolerated by the Irish government for years after the expiry of the ‘double Irish’ fix, itself a state-assisted doubling-down of Ireland’s tax flexibility following the 2008 meltdown. Shrewd use of ‘brass-plate’ real-estate, consultancy or financial firms as conduits to offshore accounts developed by 2015 into wholesale repackaging of giant corporate accounting systems to report profits from ‘intellectual property’ registered in Ireland. This technically mushroomed Ireland’s GDP by 34.4% in Q1 2015 alone (the highest ever single quarterly increase in the OECD), revealed in 2018 as being inflated by the profit-shifting activities of multinationals such as Apple.

That these eye-watering amounts were being extracted via Ireland not only made a mockery of GDP as being any kind of yardstick for phantom investment in Irish economy, but posed unavoidable political problems for the principle of the European single market and stuck in the craw of European capitalists unable to avail of such facilities in their member states. The innocuous sounding EU ‘tax package’ announced on 15 July 2020 is seen as tonic for several rather overworked tax-dodges in several member states, but the threat of regulating and taxing digital platforms operating in Europe rings alarm bells in the Irish tax haven, at least in its current form.

While the Irish government is likely to use all of its diplomatic wherewithal to mitigate its effects and bureaucratic alchemy to make its tax code compliant, it is also confronted with a slowdown of globalisation and a plateau in the digital platform economy – the tide that keeps the Irish tax haven afloat.  But rather than using the tax it would gain and make the necessary structural investments towards a more robust economy, the Irish bourgeoisie can be relied upon to fight tooth and nail to defend the unproductive system they have. It’s a strategy that has worked for generations.

Why has the hegemony of Irish neoliberalism been so impermeable?

The resilience of Ireland’s neoliberal hegemony is not built on its adherence to ‘fiscal discipline’, devotion to free-market ideology, or on economic ‘success’ at any cost. Rather, the onset of the Celtic Tiger was a permanent volte-face in Irish industrial policy away from the decentralised, export-oriented and comparatively diverse (but incomplete and declining) economy developed in large part by the Industrial Development Authority since the 1970s. The Irish miracle would be focused sectorally on financial, professional and other advanced services, and geographically centred on the capital city, back then considered a postcolonial ‘backwater’ among its European comparators by dint of the deep recession of the 1980s.

Amid the new geopolitics of the 1990s, both on the island of Ireland and globally, this decisive shift would produce a major transformation of the Irish economy and society, particularly after Ireland’s incorporation into the Eurozone in 1999. Enormous national GDP growth, Dublin’s ‘alpha-minus’ and top-ten global city rankings, attracting giant corporate HQs through fiscal deals, inward migration and population growth in this period were only slightly interrupted by the 2008 financial crash and subsequent austerity and austere ‘recovery’ since 2016.

The impact of neoliberalism in Ireland is frequently understated, and sometimes essentialised as a local iteration of a global phenomenon involving privatisation, market-oriented (de-)regulation, globalisation and financialisation. More critical accounts have identified the interplay between Ireland’s arrested industrial development and urbanisation, idiosyncratic post-colonial politics and contemporary self-positioning as ‘somewhere between Boston and Berlin’. This created favourable conditions for an enthusiastic uptake of neoliberal ‘governance’ in the Celtic Tiger years, compared to states where the post-war Fordist welfare state was more fully developed.

But what makes Irish neoliberalism comparatively resilient is that it reconfigured the economic and social geography of the whole country, and inverted what was previously a system of national government which benefited a longstanding rural/provincial bourgeoisie into one which now instrumentalises Dublin as a spatial conduit, connecting Ireland’s monetarists to the emerging circuits of financialised global capital of the late 20^th century. The spatial ramifications of this have been considerable: since 1991 the population of the Greater Dublin Area has grown by around 2/3 to represent 40% of the national population without commensurate improvements in infrastructure, and with the deepest and most sustained housing crisis of a city of its size in North-Western Europe.

Small state or city-state?

As with almost all neoliberal transformations, the primary driving-force for Ireland’s ascension to tax-haven status is its national political system. The OECD describes Ireland as one of its most centralised member-states, meaning that government (or ‘governance’) at the national level retains control over many areas of public policy which are elsewhere devolved to local or regional authorities. This situation gives the national government unparalleled leverage over the development of its single major urban centre, which it has, for example, used in 2012 to designate the ‘Docklands Strategic Development Zone’, fast-tracking the required level of office development for FDI with reduced planning scrutiny. Economic data produced by Ireland’s Central Statistics Office (CSO) shows that more than 50% of Ireland’s GDP (for want of a better measure) derives from economic activity in Greater Dublin. Gains arising from property and other financialised areas of the economy outside the city in large part flow back to Dublin through banks, mortgages and other financial products where they are reinvested (read ‘extracted’) into what financial geographer Manuel Aalbers calls the ‘quaternary circuit’ of global capital. 

These measures, taken to heighten Dublin’s global prominence firstly as a financial and professional services (and now also ‘tech’) hub exist as part of a national strategy notorious for its bending of the rules of the European single market on corporation tax and state aid to facilitate US, EU and, increasingly, Gulf capital. That Dublin now features on the GawC Global City index as an ‘Alpha-minus’ city (alongside Luxembourg, New Delhi and Vienna), and prominently in other ranking systems of urban competitiveness signifies the ‘success’ the of the architects of this situation. But the gains are often extracted entirely from the Irish economy, and are commensurate with the costs imposed domestically through unaffordability and austerity in welfare and public services.

In historical comparative terms, the magnitude of economic transformation owing to the wider process of financialisation of the Irish economy, in parallel with the state-led conversion of Dublin into an emerging urban magnet for footloose global capital, easily dwarfs that of Ireland’s tiny internal market being opened up to the Common Market in 1973. It is for these reasons, and some others, that it is appropriate to understand that the Republic of Ireland now operates competitively as a city-state in the global economy.

This type of rapid urban transformation of small or medium size places towards positionality in the global system of flows under capitalism is researched by geographers in ‘relational cities’, a categorical term referring to cities which have emerged under financialised capitalism as nodes between local, regional and global economic circuits not just of finance, but of goods, services, people, culture and information. ‘Relational urbanisation’ describes the process of adaptation involved here, which is contingent on particular governance features and historical trajectories, and relevance to the management of capitalist flows. Examples relevant to this ‘relational city’ category are commonly recognised as offshore or micro-state ‘tax haven’ economies (such as Panama City, Luxembourg or Singapore), whose relatively small, wealthy populations and unique geography represent a rather barren environment for alternative politics.

But Dublin finds itself caught between two worlds: hugely transformed towards global relevance to financialised capitalism and as the major city on an island of over 6 million people, with a large-but-weak labour movement and a century of working-class politics (even if the rest of the Republic industrialised somewhat later). The relevance of radical alternatives to (or within) Dublin’s relational urbanisation is therefore far higher than in the tax-haven offshore micro-states with which it finds itself in competition. Why, then, do socialists and progressives not see radical potential among the new labour profile this relational urbanisation model brings into being? Why is state power not regarded as a viable instrument for a more equitable economic configuration?

Labour power

One of the most visible aspects of newfound global prominence is the attraction of a new, international labour profile. The remaking of cities to attract financial/tech/professional ‘expats’ is an example of the ‘creative destruction’ inherent to this extreme process of neoliberalisation, seen in the proliferation of luxury housing and avenues for consumption in expectation of an incoming expert bourgeoisie. Gentrification is prevalent among the mechanisms employed to clear out ‘old’ working-class communities around Dublin’s docklands, to be replaced by the new cadres of higher-paid (and higher-paying) workers in the ‘relational’ economy.

That a city which becomes a globally-relevant financial hub attracts upwardly-mobile yuppies from the hinterlands and international ‘expat’ types is almost a banal observation: it comes with the territory. But what is serially overlooked in almost all relational cities is the labour intensity of maintaining the sterile glass office towers, soulless overpriced restaurants and glibly kitsch wine bars which come with the new, transient bourgeoisie. In addition to attracting a new layer of bourgeoisie, relational urbanisation quietly creates an alienated, detached and atomised working-class (both white collar and blue collar), which contends with heightened unaffordability, long commutes and precarious, hamster-wheel employment now common to the service economy. Yet much more work remains to be done to unionise the army of labour required to maintain the corporate ‘global city’, alongside current struggles and new advances in the more established parts of the city’s economy.

State power

A similar paradox seems to exist regarding state power in the small neoliberal (city-)state. On one hand, the national state has ‘made’ an economy around relational urbanisation, not only in the development of the Docklands but with e.g. the establishment of Dublin’s airport and ports as the sole hub on a national ‘spoke’ system of transport infrastructure, melding it into the system of flows of global capitalism. The Port Tunnel, the Irish government’s most expensive undertaking, exemplifies the new primacy of Dublin Port at the expense of Rosslare and Dun Laoghaire. On the other hand, the state’s limited organisational durability is routinely tested, whether in European courts over its fiscal policy or more practically in the coronavirus response. Leaning forever on a staid postcolonial provinciality operating at a global scale, the Irish state rests on its laurels with almost foolhardy confidence, in passive denial of its fragility. The ‘niche sovereignty’ it has used to utterly reconfigure itself since 1990, and now flaunts around the Eurogroup and UN, suffers from the same lack of robustness as the economy it created.

Yet the attitude of much of the Irish left to state power is that the forces that stop it from achieving it are too strong; and even in power the state would be incapable of something as humdrum as a public housing programme, let alone taking on the corporate tax policy. Those downbeat assessments are all too common, yet do not reflect the experience of the last thirty years: Ireland has a strong centralised state with easy access to plentiful capital to address its myriad problems of infrastructure and equality.

Conclusion

Irish neoliberalism might be looking up but it is enjoying the last days of its unquestioned hegemony. But it is not currently progressive, left or working-class forces which are bearing down on it. Epidemiological and economic externalities are breathing down the neck of a city-state economy in a national system defined by its smallness, centralisation and reticence to invest in an economy in desperate need of radical state intervention. Its systemic and current vulnerabilities, partly a function of its scale and partly of its operating model, are also ripe opportunities for those in labour and progressive/left movements. The contradictions of Ireland’s tax-haven city-state and the externalities it faces in its global game are finally opening up a left-right divide in Irish politics long overshadowed by traditional forces. But the Irish Left needs to rapidly develop counter-hegemonic imaginaries and strategies to illuminate them, and to branch out of the traditional areas of trade union, political party and community organisation to realise them.

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Michael Rafferty is a PhD researcher in the Department of Geography and Spatial Planning, University of Luxembourg.

Time to reflect, build and organise

by Laura Smith

The Labour Party is going through a process of rapid realignment, in which many of the key policies and ideological hallmarks of the Corbyn project are being swept aside. But, as Laura Smith explains, those on the left of the Party are busy with the difficult and necessary task of reorganising in working-class communities. 

Back in June 2017 I found myself in a situation that I never thought was possible when I was elected to be the Member of Parliament for my hometowns of Crewe and Nantwich. I was always the outsider to win, and frankly never really believed that someone from my background, with no experience of mainstream politics, could find themselves sitting on the green benches in Parliament. At first, I must admit, I let the whole place, the whole moment overwhelmed me. During my first speech my knees knocked together with nerves and the weight of imposter syndrome sat heavy on my shoulders. My father quickly made me buck up my ideas, stating quite matter of factly that I was there to represent my class and my home and in the nicest possible way, get a grip.

One of the thoughts that played on my mind was the question of delivering change for those that I represented. Always a more difficult thing to do in opposition of course, but I had made election pledges that I intended to keep. All too often politicians fail to keep to their promises, which has fed into the apathy and mantra repeated frequently that “You are all the same.” For me this included, critically, ensuring that Labour honoured the party pledge to respect the result of the 2016 EU referendum. Imposter syndrome aside, it was exciting to be part of the first real opportunity for an actual socialist with principles and consistent politics to become Prime Minister.

An unlikely route

The parliamentary road to socialism has always been an unlikely route, because of course once elected, MPs immediately fall out of the control to a degree of those who elect them. The party whips dictate the route forward-and as we all know the Labour Party has had a rocky relationship with socialism to say the least. But surely this time under Jeremy Corbyn there would be a greater chance than ever before of real substantial change. The popular policies of the 2017 manifesto, especially with regards to how the economy would be run gave me hope. Little did we know back then the degree of internal sabotage that is evident in the leaked Labour report, which may have even caused us to lose the 2017 election.

Fairly quickly after joining the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), the blockers began to fall into place. The right-wing media, teamed with the Tories and the right of the Labour Party started to put the wheels in motion to stop any chance of that near win of 2017 turning into a majority win for Corbyn in 2022. I also soon began to realise what I had feared before being elected was in fact largely true. The real decisions that matter in our lives have very little to do with our elected representatives, and instead are often made outside the formal political processes and institutions. They happen in the boardrooms of capitalist corporations, where MPs really have little influence – except of course where being an elected politician is just a second job to their real positions as directors and shareholders.

The MPs in the theatre of Parliament were sent to goad, to undermine and to ridicule by those angered at the thought that their extraordinary power and wealth might be disrupted. A pesky socialist in a scruffy suit with his mob of activists was not going to get in the way of the life that they were accustomed to. Brexit was our opportunity on the left to really change the set up in the way that this country is controlled, with a focus on democratic control, taking away the power of unelected bureaucrats. We knew the vote to leave was for change to the status quo. But we blew it.

Socialist advance outside of the EU

The two and a half years that I was there were dominated by Brexit. The failure of the Labour Party to explain what leaving the European Union could mean for socialism resulted in a party at war, the public losing trust and ultimately the downfall of the only real chance we had to have a truly left-wing Prime Minister. It was hugely frustrating – heartbreaking in fact – to see the Labour Party become such an obstacle in the democratic vote of the referendum, falling into every trap that would destroy what trust we had left with our traditional core vote. To witness it first-hand under a left-wing leadership was puzzling to say the least, but the reality of a PLP who did not support the left meant an opportunity was seized. Some, like myself, tried to make the space for a debate around the opportunities for socialist advance outside of the EU, but it was never taken. Labour’s position became ever more ridiculous.

Back in December 2018 I led a debate in Parliament raising issues of public ownership bringing to attention the dispute at the Royal Bolton Hospital. The Labour Party should have been all over the fact that in the legal case of Alemo-Herron, the ECJ ruled that private employers that take on the provision of public services are not required to pay transferred staff the pay rises they would have had if they had remained in the employment of the public sector. By prioritising the rights of private companies to business freedom over the rights of workers who find themselves in that situation, EU law creates a financial incentive to privatise our public services. For those on the left, there was also the haunting impact of the Viking and Laval cases, which placed the rights of business above the rights of workers making the right to strike even more difficult.

The official Labour position was that privatisation had to be reversed and stopped and anti-trade union laws repealed. At the same time many of the shadow cabinet actively clung on to a project that would never allow them to fulfil many of the policies that had made the manifesto so popular in 2017, instead favouring to remain in the EU. For me respecting the referendum was not to retreat into isolationism, protectionism and nationalism; on the contrary, it could herald the beginning of a new internationalism. An opportunity to actually implement the manifesto pledges ‘For the Many’. However, rather than shaking up the system, challenging the establishment and implementing our policies, we were going to be left only able to tinker around the edges.

The final straw

Even if the majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party did not particularly want to achieve real radical change, I could not understand the electoral strategy that they were taking. Many of those who were actively pushing to overturn the referendum result were representing strong Leave seats like mine. One thing I had concluded almost immediately after the referendum, was that to ignore the result in 2016 would be a profound and unforgiveable mistake. Research conducted by Lord Ashcroft at the time had concluded that the three lowest social groups voted Leave by a majority of two thirds.

In that same poll, the single reason most frequently given for voting to leave was the principle that decisions about the UK should be taken in the UK. This reflected the sense within many communities that they had increasingly lost control over their lives to the remote chambers of Westminster and Brussels, and that this was at least partly to blame for their diminished material conditions. Just one year later, more than 80% of voters cast their vote for parliamentary candidates representing parties promising to respect the result of the referendum. It was no surprise to me that after extensive Parliamentary shenanigans, and manoeuvres to pincer Labour politicians into following a disastrous second referendum campaign that the defeat in December was so predictable and particularly brutal for those of us who had tried to do something about it. It is also worth noting that the recent Labour Together report confirms that support for a second referendum was a major factor in the loss of traditional Labour communities, and that this formed part of a longer term ‘realignment’ of the Labour Party’s politics that began with the Blair era.

The fact remains that the result in 2016 was a demand for change by those who benefitted the least from our economic status quo. What is more, it was an expression by a majority of the electorate—however small and for whatever reason—that change was best achieved with the UK outside the EU. The Tories incredibly became the anti-establishment party whilst the Labour Party turned its back on the very communities it was once created to represent. Trust that had worn down over decades now eroded. In 2019 many broke the habit of a lifetime and put a cross in the Tories’ box. This is something that will not be won back without a massive amount of effort, and in my opinion can only be built up over time and by demonstrating results.

No quick fix

The question the Labour left is now asking itself as it splinters into a million pieces is ‘What do we do?’ ‘How do we save this?’ Disorganised, disorientated, and disillusioned. There is no easy answer or quick fix and accepting that is the first hurdle. This must be a major time for reflection for all of us on the left: to move forward there must be an understanding of what went wrong and acceptance of the limitations of Parliamentary politics in its current form. It is becoming more unlikely by the day that the Labour Party will anytime soon be a vehicle for socialism in Britain. But it is also clear that it can and must play an important part, in the same way the wider movement must. 

The Covid-19 crisis has shown us both the miserable inefficiency of a hollow state dependent on dodgy outsourcing companies, and the huge difference that communities can make acting in the common good and looking out for each other. Climate change and the other challenges we face will make this clearer still. The need for a change to the way this country operates is not going away-it is becoming greater. Almost daily people are being faced with the ugly reality of a world controlled by capitalists and the brutal injustices the system creates.

Building the working-class movement

This is why one area that I am happy to plough my energy into is the No Holding Back initiative that was born out of the Northern Discomfort pamphlet created by Jon Trickett and Ian Lavery, two of the MPs who pushed against the disastrous change in the Brexit policy whilst in the Shadow Cabinet. Together we are focusing on the question of how to regain trust and start to deliver for our communities again. We cannot allow policies and socialist ideas to just be dismissed and smeared by a powerful right-wing machine. Our mission is to build a diverse working-class movement that unashamedly puts the concerns of our communities and people at the heart of what we do – yes as Labour Party members, but also as trade unionists, socialists and as a wider movement. We need to give a voice to working-class socialists and ensure they can access the training and opportunities that will build the confidence to deliver a new generation of activists and candidates at all levels. Our focus is on empowering these people to embark on creating political education groups, and developing a community organising model, something that was maligned by elements of the Party’s right wing. We are focusing on bringing socialist politics to change our communities and our country for the better, whilst campaigning around policies that would benefit the many, winning the argument and making sure that they are believable.

The threats posed by the rising far right and the ongoing crises of capital mean that strategic mass mobilisation against the government and strengthened rank and file organisation in the workplaces is essential. The growth and speed of the Black Lives Matter movement mobilising across the world demonstrates how even in a global pandemic there is a clear desire to join together and fight against injustices and for change. We have of course already seen this happen with the climate justice movement that has become more active over the last few years. This movement will without doubt continue to grow as climate change is once again pushed to the sidelines in Parliament when it is arguably the biggest and most critical challenge our globe faces. 

Over the last few months, we have also seen trade union membership across the country swell, with workers recognising the likely struggles they are facing into. It is now essential that the unions educate their membership on the need to organise collectively and campaign rather than just see it as a monthly subscription to an insurance policy. The trade unions must also now work with one another to campaign and organise on key issues, supporting one another in what will undoubtedly become a more hostile period of time as businesses restructure and do everything that they can to protect their shareholders’ interests over their workers. The left desperately needs to return to the movement we were before Jeremy Corbyn became the leader, with better political education and understanding of what it is we are trying to achieve.  We must stop looking to the Parliamentary Labour Party and politicians in general to shape the future. As I have said many times politics is everything and everything is politics, and if only the people realised the power they have the policies that would benefit us all would materialise far quicker.

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Laura Smith is a Labour Party Councillor for Crewe South on the Cheshire East Council. Between 2017 and 2019 she served as an MP for Crewe and Nantwich. She is also an active member of Unison and Unite trade unions.

Neither exit, nor reform:

For a transitional approach to the EU

by Vladimir Bortun

As the prospect of a fresh Eurozone crisis rears its head, the question of European left solidarity and resistance is once again coming to the fore. Reflecting on the experience of the intervening decade, Vladimir Bortun puts forward the case for adopting a transitional socialist strategy and programme towards the EU.

The new economic crisis facing the European Union requires us to revisit the lessons of the previous one, which exposed the class character and regional cleavages of the EU. It also exposed the dangers for the left in clinging on to the hope of reforming the EU. I argue here that the left needs to overcome the binary choice of reform or exit and develop the disobedient strategy outlined by the ‘Plan B for Europe’ initiative. That strategy has to be linked to a transitional programme pointing towards the need for systemic change along socialist and internationalist lines.

European integration as a class project

Like many other hegemonic projects in history, European integration was dressed in an attractive narrative about peace and prosperity. Thus, in the early stages, the left was relatively cohesive in its perception of integration, as a new hegemonic project meant to serve the economic and geopolitical interests of Euro-Atlantic capitalist classes (see Dunphy, 2004). This came about in a challenging post-war context for the latter: nationally, a new balance of forces in favour of the working class, with increasing mass support for the left; internationally, a loss of access to resources and markets due to Soviet domination over the other half of the continent and to the decolonisation process taking place in the rest of the world. A common market built on free trade would, therefore, facilitate maximisation of profit for big capital in Western Europe, but also for an expansionist US capitalism.     

In the decades that followed the Eurocommunist turn in the late 1960s, much of the left gradually submitted to the narrative of European integration as a project for promoting peace and economic cooperation. Of course, this was not a linear process, with most orthodox communist parties, the Scandinavian red-green left, much of the Trotskyist movement and even sections of social democracy (e.g. the Labour Party in Britain) continuing to oppose the Common Market. This created in time a fundamental cleavage on the European left – perhaps the most salient today – between critical support for and opposition to integration, with its corresponding binary solutions: reform and exit.

By the 1990s, the reform position came to prevail as an expression of the wider reformism that much of the left embraced in its ideological retreat after 1989. This happened, paradoxically, as the neoliberal character of the EU was strengthened with each new integration leap, from the establishment of the Single Market (designed upon the recommendations of the big business lobby) to that of the economic and monetary union (a straitjacket on member states’ public spending capacity). Tokenistic gestures like the European Social Charter were toothless against the cuts, privatisations and social dumping entailed by the EU’s neoliberal architecture. 

Regional cleavages and the Eurozone crisis

The founding myths of the EU were used also draw in countries from the former Eastern Bloc, for which integration was presented – just as in the case of post-dictatorship Southern European countries in the 1980s – as the only possible path to democratisation, modernisation and economic development. In reality, Central and Eastern European member states have served as new markets, fresh sources of raw materials and reservoirs of cheap labour for capital from the core of the EU. Furthermore, the free circulation of capital entails a race to the bottom among these peripheral countries in reducing their taxes and de-regulating their labour markets in order to attract foreign investment. The structural funds offered in return are the whitewash meant to justify this relation of dependency.

On the North-South axis, the introduction of the Euro at the turn of the century meant that, under the terms of the Maastricht Treaty, member states were now unable to make use of monetary tools to improve their trade balances. Southern member states, with structural trade deficits rooted in the late and uneven development of their capitalisms, proved particularly vulnerable to this. The neoliberal paradigm offered them two solutions: cutting public spending, which they did; and getting loans from surplus-based economies of Northern member states, which they also did, thus cementing the North-South unequal relationship.

This laid the conditions for a perfect storm, triggered by the global financial crisis of 2007-08. In what was dressed as ‘pan-European solidarity’, the Eurozone crisis saw peripheral member states take loans that mainly went to banks in the core rather than towards their own economic recovery. The loans came attached with harsh austerity measures, implemented under the close supervision of the Troika. Austerity, however, soon proved to be an economic and social disaster, leading to staggering rates of unemployment, poverty and inequality. Their economies have never fully recovered and the public debt levels are still very high – a ticking bomb that the current pandemic looks to be the trigger of.

At the same time, that economic and social crisis led to a political crisis that saw mainstream parties lose huge chunks of their electoral base, particularly the neoliberalised social democratic parties quick to bandwagon on the new orthodoxy of austerity. Thus, on the background of mass social movements and political disillusionment, new parties of the left emerged, from Greece to Spain, opposing austerity and the underlying neoliberal character of the EU.   

The SYRIZA moment

The most successful of these parties was SYRIZA, which after successive leaps in growth won the Greek general elections in January 2015 on the basis of an anti-austerity programme. It was essentially a social democratic programme – in contrast to the party’s radical left image – that called for the restoration of the welfare state and for a European New Deal. Most importantly, it aimed to reverse previous cuts and renegotiate Greece’s debt with the Troika while excluding from the start the possibility of an exit from the Eurozone. This political choice fundamentally undermined its position in the negotiations. Hence, six months later, despite a referendum reinforcing its anti-austerity and anti-Troika mandate, when faced with the threat from the Troika with expulsion from the Eurozone, the left government accepted a deal entailing more cuts and privatisations.

The impact of SYRIZA’s defeat had a huge impact on the morale of popular classes and credibility of the left in Greece. Furthermore, it was met with very mixed reactions on the European left that ranged from justifications to accusations of betrayal. On the one hand, neither side of the new cleavage (including left parties and trade unions alike) had given in the previous months the kind of international support that would go beyond symbolic declarations of solidarity and put real pressure on their national governments to oppose, or at least not join in with, Troika’s bullying tactics. On the other hand, this new cleavage, further hindering an already underwhelming transnational cooperation of the European left, only reflected a deeper one regarding the question of the EU. While all admitted that the Troika’s contempt for the will of citizens fully exposed the undemocratic character of the EU, some – such as the newly formed DiEM25 – still insisted that it could be reformed from within. Even SYRIZA itself adopted a new strategy of building a broader coalition of MEPs, from different political groups, striving for a progressive EU.

This position, shared by a majority on the left including the Party of the European Left, essentially claims that abandoning the EU would only benefit reactionary, nationalist forces – a false dichotomy (also promoted by the neoliberal establishment) between the EU and nationalism, which effectively implies that international cooperation outside of the EU is somehow impossible. Thus, the argument goes, progressive policies can only be achieved through further integration, like the introduction of EU-level taxes.

However, such interesting ideas come without any realistic strategy to tilt the balance of forces so that the EU, with its entire neoliberal institutional design, can be pushed in a progressive direction. At the other end, the same handful of orthodox communist parties that have always called for an immediate exit from the EU, regardless of people’s consciousness on that matter, continued to do so, with the same lack of popular appeal. But at the same time, a third position also emerged: the strategy of disobedience proposed by the Plan B for Europe initiative.

The Plan B approach  

Plan B was launched in August 2015 as a call for an international summit on the question of the EU, signed by leading members of several left parties including the Bloco de Esquerda (Portugal), Parti de Gauche (France), Die Linke (Germany), De Rød-Grønne (Denmark), and Λαϊκή Ενότητα (Popular Unity, Greece), the left split from SYRIZA that opposed the deal signed with the Troika. The call described the deal as a ‘financial coup’ by which ‘the democratic, elected Greek government of Alexis Tsipras was brought to its knees by the European Union’. The first outing of this new initiative – soon joined by Podemos – took place in early 2016 in Paris and was followed by four other summits in Madrid (2016), Copenhagen (2016), Rome (2017), and Lisbon (2017).

The Plan B’s core argument, as crystallised in its political statements, was that the left and particularly any potential left government would have to adopt a two-fold strategy towards the EU:

1. A Plan A that would aim to renegotiate the European treaties while pursuing ‘a campaign of Civil European disobedience toward arbitrary European practices and irrational “rules” until that renegotiation is achieved’ – in other words, simultaneously try to change the EU’s neoliberal architecture and unilaterally implement progressive policies that would defy and openly clash with that architecture. This statement from the Rome summit offers the most detailed view of what should be changed about the EU:

“A deep reform of the European Central Bank to ensure full employment and to allow for funding public investments and ecologically sustainable economic activity as mandatory goals. … The abolishment of the TSCG/Fiscal Compact and a full stop to the institutions’ interference with national budgets … a European conference on debts with the aim to liberate the European peoples from unpayable debts … The re-orientation of the mercantilist policy agenda dominating the EU and, in particular, the Eurozone toward domestic aggregate demand to balance the current accounts. … The introduction of a principle of social non regression and social and ecological standards for the internal single market and for trade with non-EU partners … the introduction of minimum effective corporate taxation. … The adoption of a social protocol to protect social rights and collective bargaining against internal market freedoms … The preparation and the inclusion in the Treaties of the conditions to grant Member States wishing to do so an orderly exit from the Eurozone while stabilising exchange rates.”

2. Given the strong likelihood for such renegotiations to fail and for the EU establishment to threaten with exclusion from the Eurozone, if not the EU as a whole, a left government would need to already have in place a Plan B in order to avoid the same fate as SYRIZA. Such a plan would entail an ‘amicable divorce’ from the euro and the creation of a new monetary system. Indeed, in contrast to the conventional wisdom of reducing any anti-EU position to a yearning for national autarchy, the Lisbon declaration calls for ‘a new system of European cooperation based on the restoration of economic, fiscal and monetary sovereignty’.

… and its failures

However, such an internationalist alternative has not been further developed; nor is there the kind of programme needed to tackle the economic issues that would likely to stem from exiting the Eurozone, not to mention the EU. Last but not least, Plan B seems to lack a clear idea of how to build mass mobilisation in support of this strategy and a potential exit from the Eurozone. Actually, the whole Plan B initiative seems rather detached from the social groups whose interests it aims to defend, which is rather paradigmatic for the move away from social mobilisation that some of its constituent parties, including Bloco and Podemos, have displayed in their national arenas. This also seems to be the main shortcoming of other transnational initiatives, such as DiEM25 or the most recent Progressive International: founded in a top-down way, with little to no grounding in the labour and social movements, they look like an army with many generals but no soldiers.

Thus, Plan B has failed to develop in anything more than a series of party summits. An attempt to pump more life into the initiative came in April 2018, when the leaders of Bloco, Podemos and La France Insoumise met again in Lisbon to announce the creation of a new pan-European movement aiming to ‘break from the straitjacket of EU treaties that impose austerity and promote fiscal and social dumping’ and instead ‘build a new organisational project for Europe’. The new project, awkwardly named ‘Now, the people!’ movement, was subsequently joined by left parties from Denmark, Finland and Sweden. However, this ‘movement’ has not had any visible activity since and – unlike DiEM25, for example – even failed to put forward a common list of candidates in the 2019 European elections.

For a transitional strategy and programme

Despite its obvious political and organisational shortcomings, Plan B provides the embryo of what could be an alternative to both the reform and exit positions. The former is wrong on at least two levels: firstly, for maintaining the illusion in the redeemability of a capitalist project that would rather implode than become something that it was never meant to be; secondly, for failing to understand that siding with the status quo, even if critically, in the name of that illusion will not counter but aid the nationalist right, by allowing it to act as the ‘official’ opposition to the status quo (as illustrated by the case of Brexit, where most of the left abandoned the exit narrative to the right). Indeed, this flawed position on the EU question is of the key reasons for the current weakness of the left across Europe. The other position, which calls for an immediate exit in countries where the popular consciousness is not yet prepared for that, is equally flawed. In other words, if one position misreads the demands of the objective situation, the other one disregards the subjective conditions.

What is needed is a transitional approach that bridges the gap between where people’s consciousness is now with regards to the EU and the need to break away from it and from capitalism more generally – a system in deep crisis whose contradictions are increasingly unmanageable and unsustainable. Such an approach would entail, as proposed by Plan B, a left government, or coalition of left governments, disobeying the neoliberal EU treaties and unilaterally implementing policies aimed at the most pressing issues today: secure jobs, decent wages, quality healthcare and education, affordable housing, a clean environment, equal rights etc.

The inevitable resistance from EU institutions and other governments, their inevitable blackmail and threats, would reveal more clearly than ever the fundamental incompatibility between those policies and the EU’s neoliberal character. In turn, this would allow people – already disillusioned with the EU in large numbers – to draw the conclusion that they need to break with the EU.

Such a transitional strategy though would need a transitional programme, without which an exit from the Eurozone and, even more so, from the EU would likely lead to an economic disaster. Such a programme would include, among other things, the introduction of a new currency, which would initially be devalued but thereby help boost exports; capital controls, to prevent the drain of wealth abroad; nationalisation of banks, to make them work not for shareholders but for society, for example by providing cheap loans to SMEs and farmers; major public works, which would create jobs, build ‘green’ infrastructure etc.

Towards socialist transformation

However, such measures are necessary but not sufficient, as they would be met with relentless hostility from big capital and its representatives. To defend itself, a left government would have to go beyond the rather limited neo-Keynesian agenda that most of the so-called ‘radical left’ has put forward in recent years. The current context of capitalist crisis is qualitatively different from the post-WWII period that favoured (temporary) significant concessions from big capital. ‘Radical’ means to transform society from its roots and not just trim the branches. Shying away from that in the midst of system failure is what fundamentally explains the current weakness of the European left.

Given that weakness, therefore, it is hard to predict where such a transitional approach to the EU and socialist transformation could be put in practice from a position of power. Most likely, it will not come from the parties that capitalised on the previous Eurozone crisis and which have in the meantime lost much of their anti-establishment identity – but from the new left that will emerge from the social struggles and movements that will inevitably develop. This left will have to regain the courage to demand a different kind of society. It should make again the case for public ownership of the key sectors of the economy (including a state monopoly of foreign trade) and for a planned economy in the service of needs rather than profit. The ideological taboos of the 1990s have to be abandoned.

If the Covid-related crisis we’re going through is proving anything, it is that we cannot rely on the intrinsic chaos of the market to deal with the key issues facing humanity. It is also proving that under capitalism a united Europe is impossible, as each state is primarily serving the needs of its national capital. This emerged in the previous Eurozone crisis and is emerging again now, as core countries, particularly Germany and the Netherlands, are resisting the idea of Coronabonds that would see the EU as whole guaranteeing for the debt of any of its member states. That the Southern peripheral states quickly shrunk from the prospect of a major confrontation with the core powers, after initially offering some resistance, demonstrates both the difficulty and necessity of building effective alliances for transforming the economic and political system.

To avoid the failed experiences of the past century, it is also important to stress that socialist transformation would not be feasible without bottom-up democratic control of both the economy and the state. Equally, it would not be feasible on a national basis alone, since a left government without international allies would be quickly isolated and undermined. Hence, it would have to appeal to the popular classes from the rest of Europe, and beyond, for solidarity and support, summoning them to a joint struggle against the EU and national establishments. The alternative to the EU is not sovereignism, as some on the left are tempted to argue, but an international united front. Otherwise, the populist and far right will continue to benefit from the EU’s blatant failures and the left will continue to lose. Another Europe is not only possible but also necessary – and it cannot be the EU. 

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Vladimir Bortun is a Romanian political scientist and activist based in Barcelona. In 2019 he obtained his PhD with a project about the transnational cooperation of left parties in Southern Europe. Comments on this article are welcome: bortunv@yahoo.com

A perfect storm

UK universities, COVID-19 and the edtech peril

by Mariya P Ivancheva

The current crisis and its proposed solution via online emergency teaching has accelerated systemic processes already underway for UK universities under Brexit. While online education has radical and egalitarian potentials, emergency online teaching under present conditions threatens to invite in edtech corporations to dictate priorities as a contingency becomes a norm. Mariya Ivancheva warns that without serious rethinking and resistance, the UK higher education sector faces little option but to remain a tool of extraction and redistribution of public money to the private sector.

With the global spread of coronavirus and declaration by the World Health Organization of a COVID-19 pandemic on 11 March, universities in many countries have been pushed into fully digital modes of class delivery. As of 12 March, in the US alone over 100 universities had moved their teaching online. Since then, there is barely a country that has not seen the conversion of at least part of their courses to remote learning. Private education firms have since been inundated with requests from universities to step in and aid with online education delivery. And while the UK government and some senior managers of HEIs were initially reluctant to impose measures of social distancing and close their institutions, individual universities started taking the initiative themselves.

By 23 March, when lockdown and social distancing rules were finally introduced, most universities had shifted their classes online and closed most of their campus facilities, with exception of services facilitating essential labour. Since then, there has been a discussion around the lack of access to devices, secure internet connection and calm space and time for study for students coming from poorer families, living in volatile environments, and those with caring responsibilities, or with disabilities. Yet, the question of how going online will impact on academic labour in the long term, has still not been fully considered.

Not letting a good crisis go to waste

Given the criminal response of the government, that has by now cost Britain over 50,000 lives, these measures taken by universities are commendable. Yet, going online has also accelerated processes already underway in a sector which has for long been struggling with marketisation, austerity and casualisation especially since the 2008 crisis, and over which the threat of Brexit reducing EU research funding and students was throwing a shadow. Now, with the impending and unprecedented new economic crisis, fears of drastic drop in the intake of fee-paying overseas students for next academic year, and the government’s refusal to commit to £2 billion ‘bailout’ of the sector, the prospects for speedy recovery are at best bleak.

While the push to move online has meant that many students will be able to finish the academic semester and year, the assurances for staff have been much less generous. Reliant on over 50% precarious workers in teaching-only, often hourly paid and zero-hour contracts, universities have offered some furlough schemes, but a growing number are now discussing scenarios of disposing of the services of those most vulnerable. Meanwhile, edtech corporations, previously approaching individual universities through the backdoor, are now seen as ‘first aid’ or even ‘palliative’ care providers. In the current context, it is pivotal to understand how engaging with such schemes would mean further casualisation and outsourcing of academic labour, and be absolutely detrimental to the public university.

The troubled waters of marketised HE

The last decades have seen a huge redistribution of public monies to private providers. The public now bears the triple burden of education through taxation (research budgets and university running costs), paying toward study costs (student tuition, living costs and student loan repayment), and by bearing the risk of student loans (repackaged as debt and sold on to private investors). Entering public-private partnerships on terms favourable to the private side, university management teams have claimed that they benefit the ‘public good’ by investing in infrastructure and services, creating jobs and growth: a smokescreen for unsustainable exponential expansion, financialisation, and infringement on workers’ rights through even less securities and protections.

For example, academic pensions were privatised through the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS), part of a leaked offshore registered tax scheme. UK universities, rated highly by rating agencies with the premise the state would bail them out, were also allowed to borrow hundreds of millions to invest in the construction of private dorms, committing to an exponential increase in student numbers and often feeding off-shore registered private corporations in a market as big as £45 billion in 2017 already. Soulless dormitories, leisure services and facilities welcome the students, while counselling services and face-to-face contact with faculty in crammed lecture halls are a scarce commodity for students experiencing a mental health epidemic.

With fees capped at £9,000 per year for undergraduate studies, and some MA-level degrees charging foreign students over £20,000 per year – not counting food, accommodation or leisure – student debt has risen to £121 billion in student loans.  These loans are of course becoming increasingly difficult to pay due to the prevalence of precarious, low-paid jobs in the post-graduation labour market.

Last but not least, research funding still comes predominantly from public sources as the EU or national research councils. Human and financial resource investment into cyclical competitive applications with low success rates, is encouraged as ‘industry-academia collaboration’ that often benefits the private side through patents, cheap research labour and the right of private companies to veto publications.

Edtech moving in

Meanwhile, edtech corporations have taken a bigger role within universities, instrumentalising two paradigm shifts of the neoliberal free-market ideology applied to higher education as well as other public services. ‘User-’ (or in education ‘learner’-) centredness has technically meant increased burdens on the public for the development of the private sector and the individualisation of risk and debt. For instance, job training has shifted from employers to universities with a continuous shaming of academics for not being ready to train workers in the skills needed for the future job market: a task never before expected from universities.

The second paradigm used by edtech companies to make themselves relevant to universities is that of ‘solution-centredness’. The same solution is invariably offered: ‘digital disruption’: the disruption of the university institution as we know it. In response to the demand of egalitarian educators for democratisation or for revolutionising the exclusive university now subservient to power elites, edtech corporations worth $billions are presenting themselves as the solution via digital technologies. They step into a long tradition. Distance learning through technological advancements – letters, radio, audiocassette and video recordings – have been used historically to reach ‘atypical’ student populations: workers, women, people in remote locations, with disabilities or caring responsibilities. Open education – free webinars, mega open online courses (MOOCs), freely available education resources and open code software etc. – were initially part of a radical paradigm of widening access.

Yet, under the current scenario of going online in a highly marketised university sector, technology is mostly used to opposite ends. Before the COVID-19 pandemic some universities were already engaged in MOOCs, free and credit-bearing short courses, and full online degrees involving public-private partnerships with online program management (OPM) companies. OPMs represent a sector of around 60 providers worldwide within the broader edtech market estimated at $3 billion, but expected to reach $7.7 billion by 2025 – which might even increase with the effects of the pandemic. The business model usually entails OPMs getting 50-70% of course fee revenue and access to profitable big data, in return for giving back some start-up capital, risk absorption, platform, marketing and recruitment aid. A difference between OPMs and other players in the edtech sector offering digital devices or services, is that OPMs offer partly what is considered the ‘core business’ of universities: curriculum design, teaching and student support. A second difference is that unlike other private education providers, OPMs use brands of existing universities in order to sell their product without being too apparent.

Normalising casualisation and inequality

The OPM sector is particularly important to observe in the UK as this model relies on heavy academic workloads and precarious outsourced labour, and has potential to circumvent organised resistance. Many MOOCs, short courses and full online degrees in partnership with OPMs are designed and offered as part of universities’ usual offer: soaring academic workloads are intensified through online teaching without extra remuneration, despite it being pedagogically different and practically more time-consuming than classroom teaching. With COVID-19 turning emergency remote teaching into ‘online education’ this process could be further normalised.

Durham University has tried to set a dangerous precedent which will very probably not remain alone. It entered an agreement with Cambridge Education Digital (CED) to offer fully online degrees from autumn 2020 without staff consultation, but under assurances from CED that staff only needed six hours of training to design and deliver such degrees. At the same time, OPMs have already absorbed many third-level educated workers, often out of PhD and in precarious employment, to offer student support as deprofessionalised insecure poorly paid ‘gigs’, similar to Deliveroo or TaskRabbit. Not unionised under the same union as other academics, COVID-19 will ensure that these workers – often women and academics from black or minority ethnic background who are at a disadvantage when it comes to hiring and promotion –will become ever easier victims of cuts. It also means that they will be used – as temp agency academics have been in the past – to break the picket lines of protesting academics. This system feeds directly on the polarisation of academics benefitting those eligible for research grants, and who extract research from precarious researchers and replacement teaching from teaching-only staff: practices legitimised under EU and national research council funding, and research-based rankings and audits.

With COVID-19 the OPM model of outsourcing core activities and labour to the private sector, could be accelerated even further through a bigger structural change anticipated by harbingers of the death of public higher education. The huge cost of going online – recently estimated at £10 million per 5-6 online courses for a single university and £1 billion across the sector – means many universities will not be able to afford to offer online courses. Furthermore, OPMs do not work with just any university: they prefer to work with already established brands. In this conjuncture, and under the current peril of students not willing to move to the UK fearing the pandemic, many smaller and less globally visible universities might lose a significant amount of students and the funding that comes with it.

Yet, the cry for regulation and a cap on numbers that would allow redistribution throughout the sector might fall on deaf ears. A blog post by Jo Johnson, former Minister of Education and brother of the UK Prime Minister, expresses a cynical view of the future of UK universities. His formula is simple: the government should refuse the call of lower ranked teaching-heavy former polytechnics, which rarely have partnerships with OPMs or offer online courses. According to Johnson, they are to die a natural death or offer vocational courses, which they did offer before being turned into universities in 1992. Research-intensive Russell Group universities, already offering online courses in partnership with OPMs, would expand, through their globally known brands, absorbing all students and revenue. What such a vision does not spell out is what would happen with laying off teaching staff. It is not difficult to speculate that the new mega-universities will increasingly depend on ‘student support’ and teaching from OPM-hired outsourced academics in the form of deprofessionalised precarious ‘gigs’.

Arenas of struggle and resistance

This scenario is ripe for resistance, but resistance is ever more difficult. Over the last six months members of the University and College Union spent 22 days striking. One of the two disputes of this longest sustained industrial action in the sector focused on pensions, while the second one united four demands: for lowering workloads, a sector-wide salary increase (decreased 20% over the last decade), against casualisation, and for the abolition of the 21% gender- and 26% racial pay gaps. Employers, represented by Universities UK and the Universities and Colleges Employers Association, have so far not made significant concessions to strike demands. The COVID-19 crisis made strike action redundant, and higher workloads, pay cuts and casualisation are now presented as the only sector-wide solution to the pandemic and economic crises.

In this conjuncture, the new push online has to become yet another central arena of struggle for the unions. Yet, research – a key tool for academic and other unions – might be challenging: a lot of contracts between universities and OPMs are made without staff consultation and are not available to the public. Besides, research results can be considered harmful for the brand of OPMs. Still, now more than ever a sector-level audit and regulation of university-OPM contracts and edtech procurement is due, paying particular attention to academic labour and student data use by edtech corporations. While trying to stop layoffs, UCU would also need to make itself available to academic workers in the outsourced programs, with the fight to insource teaching staff as a possible horizon. And while all this might look like a very British problem, the perfect storm happening in the UK higher education sector is bound to soon spread to other contexts.

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Mariya Ivancheva (University of Liverpool) is an anthropologist and sociologist of higher education and labour. Her academic work and research-driven advocacy focus on the casualisation and digitalisation of academic labour, the re/production of intersectional inequalities at universities and labour markets, and on the role of academic communities in processes of social change, especially transitions to/from socialism. Mariya is a member of the LeftEast editorial board and the LevFem and PrecAnthro collectives. Follow her @mivanche.

The politicisation of young people and fight for socialism

by Alex Homits

The past fifty years have witnessed successive waves of popular protest and social unrest largely inspired by the conditions facing young people. For Alex Homits of the Connolly Youth Movement, the possibilities presented by current period of youth politicisation can only be harnessed through organising in the ‘community, workplace and homeplace’.

A startling poll, conducted in 2017 among people aged 18-34, found that more than half would participate in an uprising ‘against the generation in power if it happened in the next days or months’. If this is not indicative of the condition of how young people feel about their environment, social and economic conditions, and their view of politics, then I am not sure what else could indicate as incisively the atmosphere in Ireland.

The immediate question that must be posed is why do young people in Ireland feel this way? In statistics, we can find a variety of answers and in statistics a summary of those answers will be presented. According to figures from the EU, IMF and ECB 10% of all Irish young people in the South emigrated during the last recession. Statistics for the North are equally stark, cited at 3,000 young people a year leaving and never coming back. The result is that approximately one in six people born in Ireland are still living abroad, their destinations the same as those generations who went before them – Britain, Australia, North America and, to a lesser extent, Continental Europe.

This is not a new phenomenon in Irish history, and therefore carries with it a certain emotive weight. For me, as someone who was part of the ‘New Irish’ it was a bit more confusing in the immediate post-crash period to see people I had gone to school with essentially pack up and leave the country in droves to anywhere but here. I did not entirely understand what was happening and more importantly, I had no intention of leaving – we had already migrated once and as far as I was concerned, that was enough.

The departures from 08-11 were done differently but the reasons that underpinned them were the same as every generation before. The reason they were different is as a result of the work put in by American and European capital. One of the primary means of rehabilitating the ideas around emigration has been the J1 Visa to America. This programme is well advertised on every university campus in Ireland and pushed extensively. It is essentially a summer work visa. It paints out the American experience as a magnificent adventure for a young person, full of new friends and new memories and the like. The actual purpose of visas and programmes like this is to rehabilitate and normalise emigration, historically the safety valve deployed by the political class in times of economic difficulty. It’s OK to leave your friends and family is the message behind this visa and to some degree, that’s why the 08-11 mass emigrations of young people were different.

The Irish youth today

As the economy continues to shift to one that focuses on management of finance capital and services, opportunities for the majority of young people continue to diminish. A more recent article by an Irish Times columnist paints the picture perfectly. There is no place for the young, creative or the homeless, and becoming homeless is not as difficult a task as you might imagine.

Many young people get sucked into working and giving their lives to the hospitality industry – which seems like a great place when you’re studying or doing something part-time, but quickly becomes something you invest yourself in to live, settle and start a family. The hospitality industry is fully aware of this hyper-exploitative relationship and often deliberately maintains a mostly student body of workers in their workplaces. Easier to control, manipulate for hours and ensure that they remain dependent on the manager doing the roster. From our perspective, it’s one of the few jobs available, and if it isn’t, the alternatives are not great. Low paid, precarious work dominates and prevails among the youth.

The low union density within the industry is one of the main factors sustaining these horrible conditions. This feeds into a wider issue in Ireland – the new industries which young people are drawn into are not unionised. Union culture, tradition and history is lost on them. New members of unions who have matured and entered the workforce in the last few years, particularly in Mandate and Unite, have pioneered more radical measures and should be commended. But it isn’t enough and much more will need to be done to reverse the pattern of declining union density in Ireland.

In summary, the Irish youth are pissed off and increasingly vocal. We see this in how they vote, how they become active in referendums  and how they respond to disruptions of Fine Gael meetings. Young people are more politically engaged in the 2011-2020 period than they have been since the Vietnam War and 1968. The capitalist class and its political agents have activated them by depriving them of opportunities and dignity. 

The climate strikes

One of the most important and key features in the radicalisation of the youth are the global climate strikes, which occurred several times last year and brought secondary and primary school students out. The premise of the strike was simple: students withdraw themselves from school in order to protest, similar to a withdrawal of labour. My organisation, the Connolly Youth Movement (CYM), attended several of these protests. I managed to get in at three. What I saw there was beautiful.

Thousands upon thousands of radicalised and empowered young people marching together. Many of them brought pieces of art they made in school or at home. Some brought anti-capitalists slogans, I saw someone walking down the road with a flag of the Soviet Union. In Cork, when members of the CYM joined the march, we got a huge cheer: “The Communists are here!” This was an insightful little event. What did it demonstrate?

Unlike the mobilisations surrounding the Iraq War in 2003, the spreading of easily accessible internet via smartphones has helped reframe how young people engage in discussions. Memes, gifs, and so on form a central plank in introducing the youth to political ideas. What little anecdotal snippets like mine and of other comrades suggest, is that young people understand, at least on surface level the link between capitalism and climate change. As a result of this, they draw conclusions and those conclusions lead them to begin to scrutinize the world as they see it.

Campus politics

In parallel to this growing politicisation we have seen how political youth organisations have been slow to keep up the pace. They exist largely on campuses and function as social clubs for young people looking to pursue a career in politics. Performative acts such as sleep outs for homelessness done by Young Fine Gael or watching movies and eating pizzas dominate their activities. Campus political organisations have also failed to materialise outside of their own campuses, rarely engaging people not in third level education or concerning themselves with class issues.

The result of this is that the largest youth organisations numerically which are student based are politically ineffectual on bread and butter issues. Rising tuition fees, rent increases, the privatisation of university and a rapid slide in work conditions, while in third level education and out of it, have created an incredibly difficult environment for young people and the response from the student movement has been virtually non-existent.

For the most part, Student Union positions and Union of Students of Ireland (USI) positions are interlinked with the career climb of ‘activism’. You pursue election, then you either stand again or you grade up a little higher to another position and finally you either look for work in the Trade Union movement or as a political candidate. This is common, and unfortunate, but ultimately leaves the youth rudderless to combat austerity.

The limits of parliamentarism

Many political youth organisations are completely entrapped within campus politics, rarely having the creativity or innovation to break that mould. This is linked to electoralism and parliamentarianism as being the only methods of expressing one’s desire for change. I would go as far to say that political parties which rely exclusively on parliamentary means, have the strongest representation on campus and reproduce a presence on campus. These organisations are the graveyard of the radicalism that the youth possess.

We see right now, youth sections of various center-left organisations competing with one another on Twitter as to whose policies on x,y and z are better. These youth organisations have many people in them as a result of their immediate conditions, but remain gridlocked structurally and institutionally by their organisations.

Our organisation, the CYM, has attempted to circumvent this gridlock and is composed of mostly members who are working, renting and experiencing capitalist realism. Their material conditions significantly inform their politics and our ability to present a coherent, scientific analysis of how society functions has provided us with a cutting edge that all other youth organisations do not possess. We place an emphasis on community, on workplace and on homeplace. We are not afraid to explore the limitations of the law and if necessary, go beyond them. In many ways, we have assumed the role and are beginning to assume the role of what Ógra Shinn Fein might have been before the Good Friday Agreement and what Na Fianna were before the Irish War of Independence: a radical youth organisation committed to one objective.

Trade unions and the youth

The youth committees/representative bodies of most trade unions are completely inactive and function as talking shops.  This is the result of two major phenomena.

Firstly, it is the decline of the trade union in general. Since 1973 the number of workers in a trade union has declined, so has union militancy. Large sections of Irish trade union movement, like their counterparts in Britain, are ironically anti-Communist, anti-political education and in favour of class collaboration. What is meant by this is rather straightforward: the legislation that devolves industrial relations into negotiations and endless arbitration has diluted militancy and undermined the ability of unions to act. As a result, their decline has continued. This pattern is seen equally in the United States and Britain.

Secondly, as a product of the above events, young people have not joined, as they might have before. Young people are not educated about the merits of the trade union movement and rarely engage with it. Often when cold calling to various businesses or speaking to my peers you get a blank face when mentioning the word ‘union’.

The pattern of unionisation is likely to continue to change in the coming years – whether for better or worse depends on to extent to which the institutional left responds effectively to, and shapes, changes in the economic base. In the Connolly Youth Movement, our members receive political education on the merits and importance of the union movement before being aware of it and then joining, but join them. A part of our strategy is to reverse the stagnant approach and encourage young people to join with a more militant and combative attitude to dealing with problems. Minor successes have occurred, but none worth yet mentioning.

Needless to say, however, the methods the CYM has adopted have proven to be popular among our peers. Occupations of businesses, airing their nasty businesses practices or protesting relentlessly on their doorstep have yielded better results than many months of negotiations and even shocked some union officials whose entire raison d’etre is to ‘negotiate’.  We are in the middle of one of the greatest shifts of wealth in Irish society; the time to negotiate ended a long time ago.

Internationally, this is following the same trend

As more people are drawn to the unorthodox and creative ways of challenging institutional power structures in Ireland, this follows a similar trend all across Europe. The festivals that the KNE (Greek Communist Youth) and JCP (Portugese Communist Youth) organise are drawn in hundreds of thousands of people, while the resurgent Communist Party in Italy is once more inspiring a generation of very angry and disenfranchised young people. The trends of growth in our fraternal organisations suggest that crisis has precipitated a polarisation of society and we are seeing it firsthand.

Piece-meal solutions to systemic problems are no longer acceptable and the widespread use of memes, the internet and an immediate access to all knowledge and communication has radicalised young people in a way that was impossible before. In the US, 7/10 millennials say they would vote for a socialist. While my idea of socialism is dramatically different to the average American’s idea, this is nevertheless a huge leap and development of ideas represented in polling.

Complacency is the very opposite of what young radical minded activists should be doing. Now is the time for us to engage, estate by estate, community by community, workplace by workplace and build a coherent understanding of and challenge to capital.

The Connolly Youth Movement

The organisation that I have had the privilege of being General Secretary of has continued to blossom into a well-established youth organisation on the left. There are many hurdles for us to cross before we reach the number 1,000 members, but we are well on the way there. We have observed the failings and successes of other youth structures and synthesised them into our strategy. We have also drawn greatly from our fraternal comrades in the Leninist Komsomol in Russia and the Greek Communist Youth, who both boast membership in the hundreds of thousands.

It might have been thought impossible for an explicit communist youth organisation ever to take off in Ireland. In the past, Catholicism and the hegemony of right-wing politics proved to be obstacles that could not really be overcome on one hand, and on the other hand, the most militant elements of the working class and youth filled the ranks of the republican movement and its many offshoots.

Today, the political landscape is very different.  There is no armed conflict that is drawing on huge portions of the working-class youth. You could say there is virtually no struggle at all, no opposition to the powerful and mighty of Irish society.  What exists is a struggle for identity.  The youth organisations of today style themselves as representatives of a long historical lineage, one riddled with violence and struggle. This is not an exclusive phenomenon, and is even more acute in the loyalist community, where the question of unification has intensified discussion of Unionism’s future.

Big house Unionism is splintering at the seams, but this does not seem to ultimately translate to changes in the political landscape or a sort of ‘thawing’ among young people from loyalist working-class communities. But what has occurred is the transformation of Belfast City Centre and the wider economy into one focused on service and hospitality. All young people are now pooled together in the same workforce. The practical benefit of this miserable arrangement of employment is that as trade unionists, we can now seek to organise young people across communities along class lines and penetrate the insular nature that sometimes accompanies staunch communities.

Class interest above all else

I like to think that this is where the Connolly Youth excels. Our small organisation has captured national headlines six or seven times in the last 24 months, and each time precipitated a wave of applications. People join us because they want to pick a fight with those oppressing them. They want to improve their workplace conditions, don’t want to pay extortionate rent and don’t want to be evicted. It’s not complicated – but organising around these issues can be. We place our class interest above all else, and intersect that class interest with other underlying issues that capitalism reproduces or exaggerates for its own benefit.

CYM members are involved in their communities, in their trade unions and in local housing action groups. Locally and nationally we try to strengthen the aforementioned groups and inject much needed political education. We believe that if our peers are politically educated, then their ability to fight their enemy – the capitalist – is improved.  We believe this on the basis of the collective experience of the working class since there has been one. We believe it and articulate our slogan: AGITATE, EDUCATE, ORGANISE!

Two quotes, articulate the atmosphere of our membership and how they understand their own reality. One is from Bobby Sands, an IRA hunger striker whose anniversary of 39 years is marked as I write this; another is from Huey P. Newton, who was one of the founders and leaders of the Black Panther Party. Our organisation strives to stand in the tradition of Connolly and many revolutionaries who have become before us, politically and culturally.

“I was only a working-class boy from a Nationalist ghetto, but it is repression that creates the revolutionary spirit of freedom. I shall not settle until I achieve liberation of my country, until Ireland becomes a sovereign, independent socialist republic.” – Bobby Sands

“Revolutionary suicide does not mean that I and my comrades have a death wish; it means just the opposite. We have such a strong desire to live with hope and human dignity that existence without them is impossible. When reactionary forces crush us, we must move against these forces, even at the risk of death. We will have to be driven out with a stick.” –Huey P. Newton

Only by imbuing this strong sense of self among the youth of Europe, will the dramatic systemic change that we all strive and desire come.

Alex Homits is a Dublin-based trade union activist and organiser, and General Secretary of the Connolly Youth Movement.

The Political Fallout from Italy’s Coronavirus Crisis

by Rosa Gilbert

The coronavirus outbreak in Italy has ruthlessly exposed the country’s economic, regional, demographic and political fault-lines. As the government prepares to relax the national lockdown, Rosa Gilbert writes that these factors combined with the left’s weakness is providing fertile ground for an ascendant right.

Next Monday, after eight weeks of national lockdown, the restrictions on movement and commercial activity will be partially lifted, ushering in ‘Phase Two’ of Italy’s coronavirus emergency. Whilst the country has been the subject of huge international attention since overtaking China’s infection and mortality rate, the pandemic has opened up significant domestic divisions that perhaps have gone unnoticed by a foreign news press fixated by viral videos of amateur musicians and the outward projection of unity under the motto andrá tutto bene (“it’ll all be fine”).

From Phase One to Phase Two

From Monday, all manufacturing and construction sites will re-open, as well as non-public facing commerce. Shops will open on 18 May, with very stringent conditions on the cleanliness needed for shops selling items handled by the public, as well as open-air sports. Whilst freedom of movement will be relaxed from Monday, hopes that the ‘self-declaration’ forms providing a reason for being outside of the house would no longer have to be carried seem to have been dashed. Facemasks will be mandatory in all closed spaces, though in some regions (like Tuscany) the local government has already introduced mandatory mask-wearing in all public places. Crucially, exercise over longer distances is now allowed as well as family visits. From 1 June bars, hairdressers and restaurants will start re-opening, most of which are small businesses or sole traders struggling to stay afloat and with low capacity for delivery at home.

Italy’s recent history of natural disasters including the devastating earthquakes at Aquila and Amatrice and the mismanagement of their aftermath exposed the failings of the political class on a local level, who soon deserted the victims and survivors when media attention was turned elsewhere. These events have perhaps acted as a prelude to the current crisis, exposing Italy’s vast social inequalities and the political reluctance to provide a panacea, but has also laid bare the disparities between regional power and health provision, the north-south divide, political division along changing fault lines, and the continued anger over generational inequality reaching new heights.

Regional disparity in health and wealth

As in other parts of the world, coronavirus has hit Italy worse in its more populous and industrious areas. The provinces with the highest contagion rates – Milan, Brescia, Turin, Bergamo and Cremona – are clusters of business and industry. As satellites of Milan, Brescia and Bergamo are important centres of the logistics sector not just for Italy but for all of Europe. Lombardy, the region which contributes around 22% of Italy’s GDP, has suffered half of all Italy’s mortalities.

Health provision in Italy has been devolved to regional governments over decades but accelerated in recent years, creating huge disparities in provision and diverging private sector involvement from region to region, whilst resources have been depleted by mismanagement, underfunding and increasing privatisation. Since 1981 acute care hospital beds per 100,000 have been diminished by two thirds. Whilst Lombardy’s public health provision is one of the best in Europe, and certainly one of the best in Italy, its handling of the crisis compared to neighbouring regions like Veneto has been heavily criticised. Governed almost without pause by the right, and since 2013 by the League, Lombardy’s healthcare reforms have put undue strain on hospitals by weakening community health provision which critics have claimed led to too many early Covid-19 cases being missed. Lombardy has also been an exemplar for private involvement in public health provision, with lower performance standards required for the private sector. Affected parts of Veneto were also locked down early with widespread community testing introduced, whilst Lombardy’s governor failed to order a lockdown for cities like Bergamo until the entire region itself was put in lockdown on 8 March – for which he now blames the national government. But even the League’s Mayor of Alzano in the Bergamo province has admitted that they were pressured into avoiding quarantine by the business federation, Confindustria.

The concentration of cases in Lombardy has been worsened by the light-touch lockdown for many workers in the region. Although the gradual re-opening next week is significant for consumers and public-facing companies, as trade union federation CGIL have pointed out, millions of workers have already returned to work thanks to the lobbying of Confindustria. It is estimated that 300,000 of these workers are in the province of Bergamo, one of the worst-hit provinces in the whole of Italy. On 22 March, the Italian government announced it was closing all non-essential workplaces in an apparent tightening of the restrictions. But in reality, it brought in a mechanism to allow workplaces to derogate from the lockdown by applying for approval as essential businesses – 125,833 applications were made, 2500 in Bergamo which were all approved.

The clear correlation between areas particularly affected by the Covid-19 outbreak and Italy’s industrial, logistics and manufacturing hubs, with Turin and Milan still now struggling to get numbers down, created a major opportunity for the trade unions to foment opposition to the government’s deference to Confindustria’s demands. Despite a recent left turn in the leadership of the main union confederation CGIL, the response was disappointing. Apart from a threatened general strike and a 24-hour walkout by the confederation’s most militant element, the metalworkers’ union FIOM, there has been a startling lack of opposition to the continuation and re-opening of workplaces in the most at-risk provinces. Wildcat strikes have seen more success in closing car factories and winning safer working conditions. The day after the announcement of closure of non-essential workplaces, the Italian armaments manufacturer Leonardo boasted of that 70% of its workforce had turned up to its sites despite localised strikes in the Turin aerospace industry.

The Regions against Rome

The significant regional divergence in the pandemic’s impact within Italy, correlating with industry and capital intensity, has brought to the fore regional inequality in healthcare outcomes and tensions between regional and central government. Had a national lockdown happened later, or domestic travel not been severely restricted, the already stretched health services in poorer regions like Campania and Calabria in the south would have coped significantly worse than Lombardy. This regionalism within healthcare and political governance has also resulted in political jockeying between regional and central governments over lockdown restrictions and re-openings. Videos of Italian mayors and regional governors attacking their citizens for not obeying them fully were viewed with humour across Europe but less so in Italy, demonstrating the thrill of authoritarianism that many local politicians, suddenly imbued with inordinate power, are enjoying.

Some regions have now decided to pre-emptively lighten certain restrictions in opposition to central government, such as Liguria permitting horse-riding and fishing. Others, such as Vincenzo De Luca, the long-time governor of Campania, at first created further restrictions banning people from even limited outdoor exercise, and now continually threatens to extend the lockdown as a conspicuous display of his own political authority. The Mayor of Florence, Dario Nardella, tours the city with police searching for people disobeying rules even in the most inconsequential ways to recount later on his social media accounts.

Political divisions and far-right manipulation

The case of Lombardy again brought to the fore this conflict between the regions and Rome, with League governor Attilio Fontana accusing central government of interfering when it commissioned investigations into alleged malpractice in Lombardy hospitals, and negligence in failing to quarantine parts of Lombardy. In part because of its leading role in Lombardy’s government, the League has struggled to produce a convincing and consistent position on the pandemic. Matteo Salvini has tried to blame it on migrants, called for closures, then re-openings, all-the-while losing political ground to the neo-fascist Brothers of Italy. Salvini’s personal ratings are down, whilst Prime Minister Conte’s have been going up, and government approval ratings also buoyant.

Brothers of Italy leader Giorgia Meloni, unblemished by any association with malpractice in Lombardy unlike Salvini, has attracted attention by promoting anti-Chinese conspiracy theories including a video purporting to show the laboratory creation of Coronavirus, and attacking Chinese aid and medical convoys. Whilst Salvini has also weaponised anti-Chinese talking points, his involvement as Deputy Prime Minister in the first Conte government which approved a ‘New Silk Road’ trade agreement with China, despite the League having reservations, has allowed Meloni’s more vicious anti-Chinese rhetoric to gain traction. Italy’s trade relations with China, based primarily on high fashion manufacturing with growing demand in Chinese shops since the ending of its lockdown, has put pressure on Italian high fashion brands to re-open manufacturing. These relations have been manipulated into conspiracy theories promoted outside of Italy too by David Vance. Meloni’s ire has also been aimed at Five Star Movement Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio for being a ‘Sinophile’, claiming he paid double the price for Chinese facemasks.

The far-right have also tried to instrumentalise the crisis in order to attack one of the Italian left’s most significant hegemonic cultural successes, the national Liberation Day celebration on 25^th April, marking the antifascist victory. Neo-fascist party Forza Nuova called on people to take to the streets as disobedience against the lockdown and against the annual celebration of the heroism of the antifascist partisans, bringing together anti-vax conspiracists, neo-fascists, Trump supporters and other assorted alt-rightists for a “black 25th April”. In the end there was little take up and those that participated ended up facing fines for breaking the lockdown regulations.

Conte’s trouble with Europe

Whilst Meloni and Salvini have been challenged from the left (Governor of Tuscany Enrico Rossi called them ‘League-Fascists’), the social democratic-populist government led by Conte (consisting of the Democratic Party (PD) and Five Star Movement) is at risk to the right, with the League still ahead in the polls despite experiencing a downward trend. This has been worsened by the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) negotiations and fruitless attempt to mutualise Eurozone debt through so-called Coronabonds to stop Italy’s perpetual cycle of indebtedness.

Conte as a non-party political figure has appeared more defiant than other more careerist and compliant politicians, but Meloni made political capital from Conte’s climbdown by defying parliamentary orders to limit number of parliamentarians inside the chamber in order to pass an amendment to reject the ESM bailout. Matteo Renzi, former Prime Minister and now leader of Italia Viva – a liberal, pro-European offshoot from the governing PD – has defended the European Union’s actions whilst taking the seemingly ubiquitous Blairite position of calling for an end to the lockdown for the sake of the economy. Though there is much to criticise about Conte’s reluctance to face down Confindustria, it seems fairly certain that the ‘two Mattei’, Renzi and Salvini, would both have eased the lockdown prematurely.

As with the far-right’s displacement of blame for coronavirus deaths away from domestic business interests towards China, the lack of left opposition to the EU’s treatment of Italy once again provides fertile ground for the right, despite the League’s opposition to the Coronabonds initiative. Some of the biggest challenges in this regard have been pointed out by the Communist Refoundation Party (PRC), which is part of the GUE/NGL. While proposing a Green New Deal and windfall multinational corporation tax, the PRC argued that problem is not just the position taken by northern European countries in opposition to the economic needs of the south but also the neoliberalism of the centre-left and right across Europe. ‘The problem is one of political positioning,’ wrote Maurizio Acerbo, the party’s leader. ‘They want to keep our societies prisoners of public debt.’

Age Concern

Beyond the regional and party-political divides, the coronavirus crisis has heightened a latent but worsening problem facing Italian society, that of demographics. Since the global financial crisis, Italy has haemorrhaged its working-age population to emigration which, combined with a vast drop in the birth rate – linked also to growing financial insecurity and job precarity – has left it with an ageing population on a par with Japan. Whilst outsiders pointed – optimistically, but incorrectly – to Italy’s ageing population as the reason for it being so badly hit by Coronavirus, pressures on young families have worsened a demographic divide already accentuated by the disparity of living standards between pensioners and the working-age population.

This disparity has been worsened by the lockdown because of the economy’s over-reliance on tourism, hospitality and precarious short-term jobs. Further restrictions of the lockdown at the end of March, closing all parks and heavily limiting the movement of individuals in close proximity to their homes, disproportionately impacted young families and those with disabled dependents. Parents taking their children outside were fined for violating the law. After great clamour and complaints from parents, the rules were relaxed to allow one parent to take one child or disabled dependent out at a time. But the continued total closure of schools until September has upset many parents now expected to return to work whilst undertaking childcare.

As Italy emerges from lockdown, there is a great risk that these divides will be also instrumentalised by the right, still in ascendance despite Salvini’s drop in popularity and higher trust in Conte. The inadequacy of the Stability Mechanism could well drive people further into the arms of the right if the left cannot provide opposition to further indebtedness and austerity. The accruing pressure on working-age families both economically and socially could prove disastrous for the government when no longer in emergency mode. And the blame for Coronavirus may well be dumped on China by the ascendant far-right if the left fails to expose the negligence of the business lobby and place vested interests such as Confindustria, not China, in the dock.

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Rosa Gilbert is an academic, writer and activist living in Florence, Italy. She has published widely in left-wing outlets such as the Morning Star, Jacobin and the New Socialist.

State capitalism and monetary sovereignty after the coronavirus

David Karas

The coronavirus crisis has in some quarters reinforced a trend towards deglobalised responses to the contradictions and inequities of capitalism. David Karas warns that responses filtered through the lens of MMT, monetary sovereignty and statism are not necessarily incompatible with the restoration of neoliberal capitalism.

Read more “State capitalism and monetary sovereignty after the coronavirus” →