WOMEN in the UK are more than twice as likely to die in pregnancy and childbirth as those in Poland, Austria or Belarus, according to the Save the Children charity.
Its annual State of the World’s Mothers report placed the UK in 24th place globally in the best places to be a mother, meaning it is the third year in a row the country has failed to make the top 10.
Norway, Finland and Iceland were in first, second and third place respectively. The UK was also behind Spain, Slovenia, Israel and bankrupted Greece. The other great pillar of the unregulated, dog-eat-dog capitalist order, the United States was 33rd place, while Somalia remained last for the second year running, with all but two of the 11 bottom-ranked countries in the world in West and Central Africa.
The 2015 report found that women in the UK face a one in 6,900 lifetime risk of maternal death. This was far greater than Poland (19,800), Austria (19,200) and Belarus (45,200). In the US the figure was a one in 1,800 lifetime risk of maternal death – the worst performance by the most advanced capitalist country on the planet!
The charity also calculated that a child born in the UK is more than twice as likely to die before the age of five as in Iceland or Luxembourg, with the UK having a child mortality rate of 4.6 per 1,000 births, and the other two countries being 2.1 and two respectively.
These bombshell statistics come after the revelation in the Sunday Times rich list that while the working class and middle class have been suffering, the top 1000 super rich families now have collectively £547.126 billion, over £500m each, and have doubled their money in the last ten years. What seems at first sight to be a caricature of Marx’s prediction that the rich would get richer and the poor get poorer is in fact the reality of the most advanced capitalism now in its death agony.
These the depths that the UK has sunk to under the Cameron-Osborne regime, but much worse is to come if the Tories win the general election. Already over one million people are using food banks. There is already a situation where head teachers relate that their pupils are so poor that they actually bring clothes, shoes and food to school to distribute to them!
There are hundreds of thousands of youth without any fully paid work and many thousands, who when they leave university, have to take up unpaid internships with big business companies, and in some cases have to pay for the work experience!
After the election on May 7th the Tories are going to step up their offensive, with another £50bn of cuts to balance the books of bankrupt capitalism by driving millions deeper into poverty and debt. To make sure that the oppressed cannot legally fight back there are to be new anti-union laws that will make it impossible to have legal strikes. The Tories have the NHS in their sights and intend to privatise it in the next five years.
News Line calls on workers to vote the Tories out and to vote Labour, except where the WRP is standing seven candidates. We know that it is not enough just to return Labour. Returning a Labour government is just the beginning of the struggle for working class power.
The WRP is building a new revolutionary leadership for the working class that will use its strength to bring down a Labour government as it tries to carry out its own version of austerity cuts, on behalf of the bosses.
This means organising a revolutionary general strike that will bring a workers government to power. This will expropriate the bosses and bankers and establish a socialist planned economy to satisfy people’s needs. Internationally a British workers government will fight alongside the workers of Europe to replace the EU with a Socialist United States of Europe.
It will also recognise the state of Palestine and set out to establish a world socialist republic and a worldwide planned economy to use the most advanced productive forces for the benefit of humanity, so that the real history of humanity can begin.
