Monthly Archives: June 2020

How does Labour surpass its 2017 vote share?

A report into Labours 2019 election defeat has warned that Labour will lose young, liberal, left-wing voters if it tries to win back Red Wall seats by getting tough on crime or immigration.

The Labour Together report said that Labour did particularly badly in 2019 with lower-paid people, older people and people outside big cities. This led to the loss of many seats in the so-called Red Wall in Englands North and Midlands.

The report says the party could try and win these voters and seats back by combining left-wing economic policies with a strong emphasis on controls on immigration and less social liberalism.

The reports authors said this strategy could yield a higher vote share than in 2019, but would likely lead to losing a significant number of socially liberal voters to the Greens, the Lib Dems and/or the Nationalists, leaving Labour well below its 2017 vote share, with lots of younger voters abstaining too.

A similar strategy outlined by the report would combine a move to the centre on economic issues with mild social liberalism tempered by a tough-on-crime posture.

But the report says this strategy is likely to lose some left-wing and younger voters to the Greens, Liberal Democrats and/or nationalists. It would also lead to a result better than 2019 but worse than 2017.

Voters are increasingly ready to switch between Labour, the Liberal Democrats, Greens and Plaid Cymru, the report said.

The report presented data from the British Election Study which shows that Green and particularly Liberal Democrat voters are more economically right-wing than Labours 2019 voters but voters for all three parties are similarly socially liberal.

Instead of either of these strategies, the report recommends a third one for Keir Starmers Labour although it accepts it is difficult to pull off.

This strategy is: A strategy that builds greater public support for a big change economic agenda, that is seen as credible and morally essential, rooted in peoples real lives and communities.

This economic agenda would need to sit alongside a robust story of community and national pride, while bridging social and cultural divisions.

The message of change would aim to enthuse and mobilise existing support and younger voters while at the same time being grounded in community, place and family, to speak to former leave-minded Labour voters.

The bridging approach across divides would need to neutralise cultural and social tensions. Such a strategy could achieve more than 40% vote share, but would require an exceptional leadership team able to navigate building and winning trust of this very diverse voter coalition.

Joe Lo is a co-editor of Left Foot Forward

As youre here, we have something to ask you. What we do here to deliver real news is more important than ever. But theres a problem: we need readers like you to chip in to help us survive. We deliver progressive, independent media, that challenges the rights hateful rhetoric. Together we can find the stories that get lost.

Were not bankrolled by billionaire donors, but rely on readers chipping in whatever they can afford to protect our independence. What we do isnt free, and we run on a shoestring. Can you help by chipping in as little as 1 a week to help us survive? Whatever you can donate, were so grateful - and we will ensure your money goes as far as possible to deliver hard-hitting news.

Originally posted here:

Report: Greens, Liberals and Plaid will benefit if Labour tacks right on crime and immigration - Left Foot Forward

As our country deals with a flagrantly increasing rate of Covid infections, bringing to sharp relief the dire state of our long under-resourced and discarded public healthcare system, particular outrage has arisen over the excessive admission rates being charged by private hospitals of Covid patients across the country.

Reports abound of patients being charged rates ranging between 17,000 and 45,000 rupees per day, with equally high add-ons for high-end medicines and specialised equipment. Since a Covid patients treatment and convalescence can take one to four weeks, patients at private hospitals have been handed bills totalling several lakh rupees.

These rates are exorbitant by any measure, and beyond the reach of the large majority of Indians, who as per the Centres national income measures earn on average Rs.11,254 per person per month.

A whopping 57% of salaried employees earn less than Rs.10,000 a month, and only 1.6% of workers earn a monthly wage over Rs.50,000, as per a report by the Azim Premji University.

In our current lockdown-fostered economic predicament, where so many workers have been laid off, not paid or forced to take pay cuts, the financial capacity of the average Indian is bound to have further shrunk. This dwindling financial capacity has become ever more crucial as essential services are commercialised at the cost of public provision.

Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal has publicly scolded private hospitals by warning them against black-marketing hospital beds. The Tamil Nadu government has capped daily charges for Covid patients in private hospitals in the state at Rs.15,000, as has the Maharashtra government, at Rs. 9,000. Meanwhile, the Karnataka government is planning to introduce similar price caps for its private hospitals.

The Gujarat High Court too has directed the state government there to regulate the fees charged by private hospitals for treating Covid patients. And a Supreme Court bench headed by Chief Justice Sharad Bobde is currently hearing a petition on the matter of fixing Covid treatment fees in private hospitals.

These are not the first accusations of profiteering in the provision of essential products or services by commercial medical providers in the midst of this pandemic.

Last month, there was controversy over the rapid antibody test kits procured at Rs.245 but sold to the Indian Council of Medical Research by importers and distributors at Rs.600. Ironically, these tests proved to be too inconsistent for use anyway, with the ICMR, which functions under the Union health ministry, directing states to stop using them.

The cost of the regular RT-PCR Covid test, for which most private labs are charging their customers at the ICMR-set upper limit of Rs.4,500, has also come under scrutiny, because the actual cost of testing is reportedly much lower. In April the Gujarat government was itself accused of profiteering by selling N95 masks at a 31% markup.

In early March, as the Covid scare was entering the frame of our national imagination, prices of surgical masks and N95 masks too were jacked up by 300-400% by sellers, and liquid hand sanitisers were being sold on e-commerce platforms by some retailers at ridiculously inflated prices.

Of course, the Union Ministry of Consumer Affairs, via a notification dated March 21, regulated the prices of both masks and hand sanitisers to far more reasonable rates, up to June 30 with the price caps likely to be extended further.

At this point one might wonder: who are these nasty, soulless, unscrupulous commercial vultures, trying to make money during a pandemic off sick and desperately fearful people?

Are these profiteers only some people with a corrupt mindset, as per Lok Sabha MP and de-facto Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi? Or are these instances of price gouging just the trending symptoms of a deeper malaise?

The belief called capitalism

The prevailing system of organising economic relations in our country is called capitalism, an economic ideology in which everyone is essentially dependent on a market for their survival.

Crudely put, there are two main groups in this system: the owners (of capital, such as enterprises or degrees) who sell in the market to get their money, and the workers (or labourers) who sell their labour for money to survive.

In this system, workers sell their labour power to the owners, the capitalists, who in turn sell the products of that labour.

The premise of this system is that the capitalists must sell their products at a profit, that is, at a price higher than what it cost them to have the product made, in order to keep the enterprise running, and capital alive. Profit-making is the underlying premise of capitalism.

One of the reasons this system has kept going for so long is that it requires individual players or participants to function in set, predictable ways, and incentivises them to carry on their roles without any explicit coordination.

This incentive as every capitalist understands regardless of political leanings or social affiliations is that the only way to survive in a competitive market is to make the most money at the lowest cost, so that profits are maximised. This is done through interrelated economic, ideological, social, and political means.

Economically, the capitalist must hire workers, get them to work so they make him more wealth than they cost, and sell their products in a market. To get the requisite work out of his workers, the capitalist exercises power over them, both inside and outside the workplace.

Inside the workplace, it is through wages and the job insecurity that stems from hire-and-fire practices. Nearly 81% of all Indian workers are hired in the informalised sector, as per an ILO report from 2018, with no written contract, paid leave or any other benefits, all of which leaves them at the mercy of their employer. The ongoing humanitarian crisis of migrant workers is rooted in the helplessness of workers in informalised conditions.

Outside the workplace, the capitalists control is exercised through political and ideological means.

Capitalists manage politics in most nation-states either by sponsoring legislators or parties in inordinately expensive election campaigns, or by winning elections to become legislators themselves.

Look at the current Lok Sabha: 475 of the 542 elected members, about 88% of the total strength of the House, are crorepatis, or individuals with declared assets over ten million rupees. The House of the People has become the House of Capital.

These agents of capital then make laws and policy to help their capitalist ilk. Among several instances, these include tax subsidies such as Special Economic Zones, waivers or whittling down of corporate taxes that benefit only a very small number of large companies, and labour reforms that obliterate internationally recognised labour rights by which the state is bound.

While theoretically everyone has an equal say in the election process, it is materially true that competing in elections, and winning them, requires significant material resources. The 2019 Lok Sabha election is estimated to have cost political parties Rs.50,000 crores, or $7 billion, a full $0.5 billion higher than the cost of the 2016 US elections.

It wasnt always the case that elections were so expensive.

Since material resources are distributed unequally in our society, the ability to participate in elections and win is also skewed. Parliaments become filled with representatives enormously wealthier than their constituents, and political parties awash in campaign donations. The election winners use their public office to return the donors favour, giving these capitalists disproportionate power to promote their interests at the cost of the working majority.

Ideologically, capitalists have shaped the social ethos in such a manner that the inequities in, and the marketisation of society perpetrated by contemporary capitalism are seen as the eternal, natural order of things.

According to capitalist ideology, people get the income they deserve, and if they dont like it, they cannot change it.

Compare a 2018 World Bank report revealing that 75% of the current average income of a millennial Indian is based on inherited parental, social and political privilege.

Why do private hospitals get away with profiteering?

Now that we better understand how capitalism works, let us revisit the private hospitals. In the pre-Covid era, the bread and butter of these hospitals were elective surgeries, OPDs and international patients, all of which have declined substantially post Covid.

In the last ten days of March the commercial medical-care sector is estimated to have suffered a loss of 50-70% in revenue, a quantum of loss thought to have continued into the present, as private hospitals are pressed to dedicate a higher proportion of their beds to Covid patients.

However, owner-profits are paramount to the survival of any capitalist endeavour. One cannot expect the fundamental tenet of capitalism to change merely because of a pandemic. Short-term profit-making reorients itself to the upheaval the pandemic has caused.

As a matter of fact, academics and scholars who have faith in capitalism resolutely defend price-gouging and profiteering. In this scenario, for governments or courts to sporadically regulate the prices of certain goods or services is a band-aid that redresses some symptoms, but not the actual ailment.

The sooner we realise that the black activities we mistakenly attribute only to some people with a corrupt mindset are actually the article of faith in our system of economic organisation, the sooner we will learn to ask:

Why has something as essential as health and medical care been left to the vagaries of the market in the first place?

Then we can begin the work of instituting meaningful reform in this system that does not benefit most of us, especially in times of crisis.

In simpler words: dont hate the player, hate the game.

Vineet Bhalla is a Delhi-based lawyer

Follow this link:

COVID Bed Auctions: Searching for the Liberal in 'Neoliberal - The Citizen

Liberalman is the superhero we neither need nor deserve in real life. The fictional one, however, is something India absolutely needs to show the mirror to the hypocrisy of those who identify themselves as liberals but are actually far from then. The Daily Switch, a political, media and culture website, on its social media account shared the antics of liberals and Liberalman, the new superhero in town.

In one of the viral videos, two animated characters are looking helplessly at their burning building where their 4-year-old is trapped. Liberalman, with his superpowers, flies in and the parents are hopeful that the superhero will save their child. However, Liberalmans rescue operations come with terms and conditions. He only helps the most repressed people. When the parents inform that their daughter is only 4 years old, Liberalman agrees as she would have surely been a victim of sexism. Liberalman, however, helps via options like candlelight march and the dafli of doom. Clearly, Liberalman has his priorities sorted.

A liberal initially agrees with a commoner that Sonu Sood did great work helping migrants reach their hometowns. However, when Sonu Sood in a video says that he is a fan of PM Modi, Liberal person now believes that Sonu Sood was irresponsible as sending back migrants might have spread coronavirus to villages. He also wants azaadi from murderer Sonu Sood.

Struggling and washed up standup comics and actors have a new ray of hope. Liberals in India have a solution to restart their career. The Placard and woke message combination. It may not make them funny, but at least itll make them famous!

This is just so relatable. Unless you agree with them you are from the IT cell. Or from the RSS. A true liberal will never agree with anything right is happening in India under PM Modi.

Not to undermine the efforts of everyone who have put forward everything they have to help India fight the pandemic, we all now the one equivalent to the JNU student above who is armed with a dafli of doom while fighting those who are fighting the pandemic.

For more, you could follow The Daily Switch here.

Go here to read the rest:

Liberalman and more watch these 5 clips going viral that expose liberal hypocrisy - OpIndia

We live in the strangest of times. While the Department of Justice seeks to introduce new laws to protect our national heritage, Britain in 2020 is more tolerant and socially liberal than it has ever been.

Yet culturally, we are re-entering the dark ages. Our history is being erased before our very eyes, while nations, corporations, universities and comedians alike scramble to apologise for past crimes they havent committed. How is it we have become so accepting, yet so closed-minded at the same time?

The proposal to replace the statue of Cecil Rhodes with that of Alain LeRoy Locke, an Afro American student who studied at Oxford from 1907 - and one of the many who benefitted from a Rhodes Scholarship is such an example. Will the many hundreds of recipients of this scholarship now hand back their tainted degrees?

But its not all about statues.

Our increased tolerance and liberalism towards minority groups in this country can no longer be in doubt. Even the most pessimistic observers would have to concede that great strides have been made in the past two decades alone. London and Birmingham are now the most cosmopolitan and racially integrated cities in Europe, if not the world.

An Ipsos Mori poll showed that in 2006, 82% of people disagreed with the notion that you have to be white to be truly British. In the last 14 years since, that figure has risen to 93%.

And within the past decade, attitudes towards immigration have also changed dramatically. One Ipsos Mori poll found that in 2011, 64% of Brits believed immigration to have had a negative impact. By 2019, that had fallen to just 26%.

At the turn of the millennium, civil partnerships, let alone same sex marriages, were still years away. According to NatCen, almost half of Britons believed homosexual relations to be wrong in 2000. But by the end of the 2010s, only 15% thought the same way.

Until recently, depression and other mental health issues were taboo subjects, shunted out of sight by the public. No longer.

Yet in spite of all this, we have lurched backwards on a cultural level.

Consider the sight of self-proclaimed anti-fascists defacing the statue of Winston Churchill, the man who led the fight to defeat the most vile fascist in history.

This new form of authoritarianism now extends to almost every level of our culture.

Some comedy shows are disappearing from TV altogether, as is the case with Little Britain, Come Fly With Me, and the famous dont mention the war episode of Fawlty Towers, due to the perceived offensive nature of some of their jokes. The fact that these skits often lampooned bigotry and racism is seemingly lost on todays pop culture commissars.

Attitudes towards sex and the way women (but not men) dress are also becoming increasingly puritan.

The absurd controversy over the now infamous beach body ready adverts in 2015, which depicted a toned woman in a bikini advertising a slimming product, was just a forerunner to the policing of womens bodies we see today.

What makes these cultural restrictions so pernicious is that they are not being enforced by the government, but rather by society as a whole.

There are few laws against offensive jokes, for example, provided theyre not libellous or overtly discriminatory. However, todays stifling culture of self-censorship means that many jokes or viewpoints which do not fall foul of the law are nonetheless off-limits, lest those who express them want to be hounded into a grovelling apology.

It doesnt even matter that the majority of people are opposed to this sort of neo-Mary Whitehouseism. Fear of being socially ostracised is enough to ensure many will nonetheless be compliant.

The implications of such an environment are bleak.

Many classic cultural works, some from not that long ago, simply would not have been able to get off the ground today.

The British creative industries, once a beacon of brilliance across the world, face an uncertain future. Many artists and producers will take the safe road, sterilising their works and purging them of anything that could possibly cause offence to anyone.

The hounding of the actor Lawrence Fox by Equity and other self-appointed arbiters of woke is but one such example.

Issues in the arts involving race, religion or sexuality are becoming sanitised to avoid provoking a firestorm of controversy. Or worse yet, they may just be ignored altogether.

But perhaps the most damaging thing about all this is that it puts the hard-won gains for social liberalism at risk.

By strangling speech and expression under a corset of political correctness, tensions between majority and minority groups will only get worse.

A false juxtaposition between social liberalism and free speech is already emerging, and many will pick the latter, especially if they themselves have little experience of discrimination.

Its time for social liberals to stand up against this tide of cultural conservatism. We must speak out for free expression, while aggressively defending the values of tolerance and compassion.

Michael Fabricant is Conservative MP for Lichfield and served on the House of Commons' Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee

More:

Its time for social liberals to stand up against the tide of cultural conservatism - Telegraph.co.uk

WINNIPEG -- A Manitoba Liberal MLA is looking at the possibilities of a rapid response team to help personal care homes in the province respond if an outbreak of COVID-19 were to occur among residents.

On Tuesday, Jon Gerrard, Manitoba Liberal Party health critic and MLA for River Heights, hosted a Facebook Live forum on how personal care homes can prepare for a second wave of COVID-19.

Gerrard was joined by personal care home advocates Dot Sloik and Beverley Dueck to discuss changes they would like to see in the quality of care for Manitoba residents of personal care homes.

Among these ideas, Gerrard called for a rapid response team to help staff at care homes deal with potential outbreaks of the virus.

"They need to be able to come in, they need to be able to help the care home and get on top of the situation, make sure that the protocols are being followed, that people are being isolated and looked after well," Gerrard said.

"Its a crisis when you got a personal care home with somebody with an infection in it, and having a team which has been trained so they are ready to look after such an infection is a pretty important step."

Sloik said her father was in a personal care home from 2014 to 2018, and during that time, there were incidents of influenza.

"It caused more challenges than the staff was prepared to deal with and it's usually not enough staff to begin with," she said. "I can't even begin to imagine how overstressed the staff would be in a COVID incident coming into the care facility and the biosecurity is really difficult."

Both Dueck and Sloik said more staff are needed to improve the quality of life and care for residents.

The panel all called for the public release of the results of unannounced Personal Care Home Standard Reviews.

About 40 documents released through the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act and obtained by CTV News shows the results of some of these reviews which reported incidents of uncleanliness in facilities.

READ MORE: Personal care home reviews need to be made public in Manitoba: health critics

"That is important not only to maintain high standards, but also when people are choosing a personal care home they can make a decision based on what people are finding during inspections," Gerrard said. "I think that will again put some pressure on people to do better in personal care homes."

A written statement from Manitoba Health, Seniors, and Active Living Minister Cameron Friesen said approximately 80 per cent of all deaths in Canada related to COVID-19 have been linked to personal care homes.

He said the province has been working to prevent the spread of any outbreaks, citing visitor restrictions, enhanced environmental cleaning and disinfecting practices, daily staff screening, adherence to provincial personal protective equipment requirements, and the implementation of a single-site PCH staffing model.

He added the province is committed to posting the outcomes of standards and unannounced reviews in personal care homes "with the intent of providing meaningful information to Manitobans, so they can make informed decisions.

Read the original post:

Manitoba Liberal floats idea of rapid response teams for second wave of pandemic in care homes - CTV News Winnipeg