Tag Archives: Coronavirus

By Elin Wilding, Cardiff West Socialist Party Students in lockdown Cardiff protested on Sunday 4 October to demand the refunding of student fees for this year, and the abolition of tuition fees entirely. Around 70 students attended in spite of the Welsh weather. The mood was angry and has been for the last week. The demonstration was called by a ...

Expensive online courses in ghost towns Going to university right now feels like walking into a trap made of fire, surrounded by circling sharks, as alarms blare off in every direction. Watching the news and seeing the blame go to students for the rise in cases just goes to show how afraid the capitalist class is of young people today. ...

Two million people in lockdown, virtually the whole of South Wales from Llanelli to Newport and two thirds of the Welsh population – the second wave has arrived. The Welsh government has announced strict restrictions on people’s movements, but only as far as their personal lives are concerned. If they are involved in making money for other people then the ...

By Dave Reid Hundreds of people in Covid-hit Rhondda Cynon Taff were turned away from a local Serco-run testing centre after the UK government had imposed a quota of just 60 tests because of high demand in England that the private corporations contracted to process the tests could not cope with. This happened despite when Rhondda Cynon Taff is on ...

By Dave Reid The rise in coronavirus cases that has led an announcement of a partial lock-down in Caerphilly county has caused worry and concern for many people in the area. The Welsh government has imposed the lock-down as the number of confirmed cases of cases of Covid-19 has risen above 50 per 100,000. Welsh health minister, Vaughn Gething, said ...

By Gareth Bromhall Gareth Bromall (GB) spoke with a 12 year old pupil of Penyreol Comprehensive in Swansea about their experience of what going back to school was like last week. Penyreol Comprehensive has its own risk assessment that stipulates how social distancing will be maintained with a one way system in the school and bubbles for each year etc. ...

By a Caerphilly National Education Union (NEU) rep When we returned to work in Caerphilly, despite the headteacher’s best efforts, lack of routine testing was causing huge anxiety among staff. Students weren’t in yet – but we knew that, within a few days of reopening, there would be 33 different students in front of us every hour. We were advised ...

From the Socialist Party Scotland website By Jim Halfpenny, EIS joint secretary West Dunbartonshire (personal capacity) The experiment has begun. With shameful political expediency the SNP government in Scotland has reopened schools and brought all pupils, teachers and support staff back together in the midst of this pandemic. While their position is that everyone 12 and over must physically distance ...

Statement by the International Secretariat of the Committee for a Workers’ International The words of W.B Yeats, from his poem ‘Easter 1916’, sum up the current world situation: “All changed, changed utterly.” 2020 is the opening of a new era, as we have explained in the previous CWI analysis. Fundamental changes are taking place in the world economy, geo-political relations, ...

By Dave Reid Mark Drakeford’s Welsh Labour government has made much of the “four nations approach” to tackling the Covid-19 crisis, claiming to plot a different course to the Tory Westminster government. But the reality is that the Welsh government has been more like a small boat being pulled in the wake of an ocean liner. And in the case ...