It is pretty late in the day for the big businessmen of the CBI to "discover" that Johnson is a clown-act.  But on their part, to be disappointed is to be downright ungrateful!  Because under cover of supposed "reform" - whether it be to social care, the NHS, or the railways, he has made sure that they will all be "quids in"!

    Of course they always want more. But while it may have helped to win votes from the North's poor, "levelling up" was always about providing yet more subsidies and "freedoms" to big and small capital.  Yes, in order to screw a casualised, many-tiered workforce, which has among the worst Ts&Cs in the OECD!

    So what sort of reform is really needed in social care?  A "cap" of £86,000 on what you have to pay?  Which won't even take into account what's paid to (private) care homes for food and board?  How many working class pensioners would keep hold of their houses even before this "cap" kicks in?

    Yet there is no question of taking this whole sorry sector out of the hands of commercial companies - whose profiteering out of social need will be protected (if not enhanced) - by this so-called reform! 

    And by the way, it's not just the elderly, deprived of their last bean, who are at the mercy of the government's privateer mates. Children in need of care are increasingly at the disposal of private "providers"!  Paid by local authorities, they make a huge, 17% (!) profit margin!  CareTech and Keys Group, Outcomes First and Nutrius account for 14% of children’s homes and 31% of fostering placements.  It's hard to imagine anything more cynical than a government-sponsored capital "market" for "children in need"...  And then these politicians and their crony-celebrities hypocritically promote charitable auctions on BBC TV for these exploited kids?

    As for the NHS, it's already running on empty.  We're told that 4,500 patients died in 2019-20 because of ambulance delays.  Paramedics and ICU doctors are writing letters to the government saying they're working up to 100-hour weeks, often without breaks.  No wonder, with 93,000 workers short.  Patients wait 16 hours for an ambulance.  Just now, 35% of beds are occupied mainly by unvaccinated people, sick and dying from Covid. Yet Johnson and Javid congratulate themselves on the government's "brilliant management" of the pandemic!

    This social crisis is a political crisis. It will only come to an end when the working class gets organised and fights to change the whole, rotten, system. There's no alternative.

Forget the NHS crisis, the social care crisis, or Covid hospitalisations!  We're told that the "national emergency" is a "surge" in asylum-seekers crossing the Channel in small boats!

    So far this year, 25,700 people have arrived on the Kent coast - apparently 3x as many as last year.  But regardless of how the media portrays it, this is a very small number.  There are more than a million job vacancies in Britain, including over 200,000 across the NHS/social care - there's plenty of work that needs doing here!

    The latest official figures show Britain has negative net migration - more people leaving than arriving. And when it comes to offering asylum, proportionately Britain offers sanctuary to far fewer people than Germany, Spain, Greece or France.

    So, for this, the 6th richest county in the world, it's no real problem. Of course, it may be a problem for "Brexit" Johnson who said he'd "take back control" of many things, including the "border"...  having blamed EU migration for the ills his capitalist friends bestow on the rest of us.

 And now the government is using its large resources to punish refugees for arriving here. Patel wants to build new camps to imprison them. In July, she spent £54m on police patrols on beaches and aerial surveillance. Yet there are 55,000 asylum seekers who've been waiting for a decision for more than three years, and who cannot work in the meantime!  There's no plan to sort this out, however!

    The Nationalities and Borders Bill currently going through parliament further criminalises migrants, making it nigh impossible to claim asylum, unless already "offered" a place - and for that, they'd have to be in a camp in a poor, war-torn country. Politicians say they want to stop migrants taking "dangerous" journeys, but they've made it impossible to get here by any other means!

    These reactionary MPs wish that they could turn the clock back and stop all migration, full-stop. But today, borders can no longer have any meaning. Whether it's poverty, climate change, or war, thanks to a ruthlessly unequal world capitalist system, people have to flee for their very lives. And they are our brothers and sisters; our fellow workers. They have more right to a place here beside us than the bosses and their politicians - whose policies are killing us all.