I’VE been watching in disbelief and horror what has been happening on US college campuses over the last few days. As a graduate of Columbia’s SIPA (School of International and Public Affairs), I’m both proud of the students and appalled and disgusted by the university administration’s brutal suppression of their right to protest against Israel’s genocide and the US government’s political and financial support for it.

It’s not just the Columbia University administration that has behaved abominably but also some members of faculty. A professor at SIPA, Rebecca Weiner, is a former deputy chief of the NYPD Counter Terror Division which has an office in Tel Aviv. She appeared alongside pro-Zionist New York City Mayor Eric Adams to justify the arrest and expulsion of students who were exercising their First Amendment rights because they had “dangerous ideas”. (I’m sorry to report that Hillary Clinton and Victoria Nuland are also adjunct professors at SIPA, and the SIPA Dean is a former Israeli intelligence officer – enough said.)

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The US constitution protects hate speech, unlike Scotland. Yet the NYPD arrived on campus at 2am in a bearcat vehicle with tactical assault teams to arrest the students and load them onto NYPD and even city buses which they had taken over. Columbia’s President, Minouche Shafik, a UK Baroness and former Bank of England executive, rejected calls for Columbia to divest from Israel and has demanded that the NYPD occupy the campus until May 17.

The lamestream media reporting of the US campus protests has been predictably shameful. It has demonstrated its complete capture by the US security state when it falsely described the students as anti-semitic and violent.

The hand-wringing US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is really running the US. His boss is not Joe Biden but Benjamin Netanyahu and the other nutjobs in the Israeli regime. Last week Netanyahu attacked the US students, calling them Nazis, and demanded that US federal police wage a military-style crackdown on them. Blinken made sure it was done.

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Meanwhile, the fanatical Israeli national security minister Ben Gvir is calling for a mass execution of Palestinian “prisoners” held as hostages in Israeli jails, who haven’t even been charged with a crime, in order to ease overcrowding. And on Wednesday night in Rafah, Israel attacked by air and firebombed people in their tents. You can find pictures of children’s bloody bodies on social media, but will hear not a word of condemnation by the US government.

That’s what these students are protesting. And they’ve been badly let down by the baby boomers, who protested the Vietnam war in the 1960s because they didn’t want to be drafted, but who are now silent while their children and grandchildren are arrested for opposing a genocide and their government’s complicity in it.

Leah Gunn Barrett
Edinburgh

ON the Wake up to Money radio programme on Thursday morning, Mike Pageant, an owner of several care homes in North Yorkshire with around 200 employees, described his company’s situation with regards to lack of staff.

This discussion was initiated due to the UK Office of National Statistics report of a reduction in applications for visas for care and skilled workers and students from 184,000 in the first quarter last year to 139,000 this year, a reduction of 45,000. He advises that recruitment to the sector is still challenging, and they have seen a drop-off in enquiries due to the changes introduced last month.

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The key issues are the salaries of the care workers and the visa rules limiting them from being permitted to bring their dependents.

The care sector would like to employ more staff from this country, but there just isn’t the interest in low-paid, low-valued job.

In a market economy this should cause the wages rise to entice people into these jobs, however the majority of these care homes are funded from local authorities, and they are cash-strapped in England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland, being funded by central UK Government.

Mike Pageant commented that the care sector was “between a rock and a hard place” and he didn’t know the answer.

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In his view the UK Government is making it as hard as possible to bring in foreign workers and their dependents to fill gaps in care-worker recruitment due to Covid and Brexit.

Central government funding and the status value of care workers must increase to correct this, and in my opinion reversing the change to visa rules to allow dependents would also help.

Covid started the chain reaction, but Brexit and the migration policies of this Conservative government are amplifying it, and the UK Labour Party shows no signs of reversing it any time in the future.

If GDP is the measure, it is driven by population and productivity. In future years, without a care sector that works, people in their productive middle years will have to leave work to care for their elderly relatives. Why does the UK Government “penny pinch” from real care to fund vanity projects like Trident and HS2 which are no deterrent or don’t meet the hype?

Alistair Ballantyne
Angus