Monthly Archives: May 2005
The Palestine National Authority (PNA) said yesterday Israel’s promised release of 400 Palestinian prisoners was ‘not enough’. Palestinian Minister of Labour and Social Affairs, Hasan Abu-Libda, said more than 11,000 Palestinians are behind Israeli bars and they should be set free.` Abu-Libda said the Israeli decision was a unilateral step without...
THE 55 per cent vote, by the working class and the rural population of France against the European Constitution, is a body blow to the plans of the bosses, bankers and bourgeois politicians of Europe to establish a European capitalist state, powerful enough to smash the European workers and...
Dutch workers are ready to deal another blow to the bosses and bankers’ EU by following the example of the French and voting ‘NO’ to the proposed EU Constitution in tomorrow’s referendum. Leading ‘No’ campaigner Harry van Bommel, of the Dutch Socialist Party, said yesterday he expected the ‘No’ campaign...
WHILE the US was piling the pressure on Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas to force the Palestine National Authority to disarm all the anti-occupation groups, the armed-to-the-teeth Israeli Occupation Forces were shooting more Palestinians dead. The Israeli regime is also obstructing the arming of the PNA police at the same time...
THE 55 per cent vote, by the working class and the rural population of France against the European Constitution, is a body blow to the plans of the bosses, bankers and bourgeois politicians of Europe to establish a European capitalist state, powerful enough to smash the European workers and...
IN a major climbdown the BBC trade union leaders have suspended, ie cancelled, next week’s 48-hour BBC strike and will be holding a meeting of trade union representatives on Tuesday May 31 to put the BBC management offer to them. The trade union leaders are making no recommendation to the...
NEXT Sunday, France will be voting in a referendum on the proposed EU constitution, and to the astonishment of the leaders of the Gaullist parties and the Socialist Party plus the French bourgeois media, the French working class is poised to vote ‘no’ to a united capitalist Europe. President Chirac,...
Amnesty International has accused the United States of effectively giving governments a licence to torture. In its annual report covering 2004, the human rights organisation says the Bush administration’s selective disregard for international law and abuses of detainees was sending a ‘permissive signal to abusive governments’. ‘Governments are betraying their...
A SURVEY from pensions advisers Origen published yesterday shows that companies are continuing to either close their final salary pensions schemes or end admission to all new starters. Only 35 per cent of companies now have final salary pension schemes, as against the 40 per cent that had them in...
Over 11,000 BBC journalists and technicians took strike action last Monday over savage job cuts and privatisation announced unilaterally by Director-General Mark Thompson in March. Thompson plans to slash almost 4,000 jobs, 20 per cent of the workforce and sell off BBC Resources Ltd and BBC Broadcast Ltd. The BBC unions...
ASLEF is the first trade union to call for ‘regime change’, a change in the leadership of the Labour government if it continues to refuse to carry out the policy of the Labour Party which is to renationalise the railways. Welcoming the return of ‘an historic third term Labour government’,...
The BBC was gripped by the biggest strike in ten years yesterday, as over 11,000 journalists and technicians from all three BBC unions – Amicus, BECTU and the NUJ – shut programmes down across England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. Radio 4’s Today Programme, The World at One, PM and The...
PALESTINIAN president Mahmud Abbas is set to meet US president George Bush in Washington this Thursday for an urgent summit. The Palestinians said this is ‘to seek clarification’ from the Americans about their intentions regarding the ‘roadmap’ peace plan and also about their pledged financial and political support to the...
CAPITALIST Britain is being driven backwards, not forwards by the deepening crisis of capitalism and the policies of the Blair-Brown Labour government, dedicated to keeping bankrupt capitalism afloat. Adair Turner, the government’s man in charge of developing a plan for pensions, has let it be known that capitalism cannot afford...
Picket lines are out at BBC sites across the country today as 10,000 workers from all three BBC unions – BECTU, NUJ and Amicus – take action against Director-General Mark Thomson’s plans to axe 4,000 jobs and cut services. ‘We think the BBC will have problems getting any programmes out,’...
Over 5,000 members and supporters of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign last Saturday marched and rallied in central London under the banner of Free Palestine. The march and rally marked the 57th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba (Catastrophe), the founding of the Zionist entity of Israel in 1948. Marchers chanted, ‘Free, free...
THE Afghan puppet president, Karzai, has gone to Washington and been forced, by rising Afghan anger, to publicly complain about the actions of the US government and military. The revelation that copies of the Koran were flushed down the toilet at the US concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, in occupied...
A leaked US Army Criminal Investigation Command report has revealed a catalogue of prisoner abuses, including two deaths, by the US military at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan. Two Afghan detainees in US military custody at Bagram in 2002 died after being severely beaten as part of a pattern of abuse,...
IT IS the United States of America that is being humiliated in Iraq and not Saddam Hussein. The idea that putting pictures – provided by the CIA or US military intelligence – into a British newspaper of Saddam Hussein in his underpants would demoralise the Iraqi resistance and ‘break the...
GREEK workers last Thursday staged a massive and militant general strike against the right-wing government of Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis, elected a year ago. Record high participation numbers were recorded and were emphasised by the Athens capitalist press. Mass demonstrations took place in every single Greek city and town. Not...
A LONDON postal workers’ leader yesterday warned the government they will face massive opposition, if they go ahead and try to break Labour’s election manifesto pledge of ‘no plans’ to privatise Royal Mail. John Denton, London regional secretary of the Communication Workers Union (CWU), told News Line: ‘The union will...
YESTERDAY the British Foreign Secretary Straw condemned the repressions by the Karimov regime in Uzbekistan. It has already killed 500 Uzbeks and is getting ready to kill a lot more, in order to put down an insurrection against its dictatorship – a dictatorship which is backed by the United...
‘This is really the destruction of the NHS,’ Vincent Marks, professor of clinical biochemistry at the University of Surrey and a long-standing supporter of the Labour Party, said yesterday. He was infuriated by new Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt’s announcement of the doubling or trebling of NHS operations carried out by...
YESTERDAY key Blairite cabinet ministers, Blunkett and Hewitt, launched a massive attack on the Welfare State. Hewitt promised to use the NHS budget to build up the private medical industry, while allowing NHS hospitals to close, while Blunkett pledged to get rid of the Welfare State ‘safety net’ –...
THE widow of Harry Stanley is consulting her lawyers, after a High Court judge yesterday quashed an inquest jury’s verdict of ‘unlawful killing’ over the police shooting of her husband. Irene Stanley is considering whether to pursue an appeal against the ruling by judge Justice Leveson that the first inquest’s...
YESTERDAY the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, joined in the hysterical attack that the state and bosses are launching on Britain’s youth. Millions of young people are being victimised by capitalism. They are either exploited on New Deal slave labour schemes, or face massive debt if they seek to gain higher...
‘This union is not crushed, this union is not defeated, this union is united and it will be ready for a fight on pensions,’ FBU General Secretary Matt Wrack told delegates at the union’s Annual Conference in Southport yesterday. He was proposing the Executive Council’s Emergency Resolution 2 on pensions,...
BRITAIN is now being run by a weakened and discredited Blair government, which is however determined to speed up its right wing course and intensify its attacks on an already angry working class. Its offensive is going to target both the public and private sectors of the capitalist economy.
The government...
The Disengagement Administration bases its assessment on the fact that according to the disengagement law anybody not leaving by that date could lose tens of thousands of dollars in compensation money. Seven young men have sustained various bruises and wounds, one seriously, after the Israeli occupation forces assaulted hundreds of...
Opposition to prime minister Blair hardened yesterday in the wake of his final ministerial appointments. Opponents have been especially infuriated at the appointment of one of Blair’s policy advisors, Andrew Adonis, as schools minister. Adonis, who is said to be the driving force behind top-up fees privately-run City Academies and...
PRIME Minister Blair, despite all his vows about listening to the people – made outside 10 Downing Street on the day after the general election – has immediately resumed normal business. He has slapped the Labour Party in the face and used the House of Lords to bring key...
AUT general secretary Sally Hunt is launching a manifesto for academic-related staff in Manchester on 12 May calling for more pay, reduced hours and extra staff. The manifesto is being supported by poet Benjamin Zephaniah, who writes about the value of libraries and particularly the librarians who ‘protect us from...
PRIME Minister Blair, despite all his vows about listening to the people – made outside 10 Downing Street on the day after the general election – has immediately resumed normal business. He has slapped the Labour Party in the face and used the House of Lords to bring key...
‘I HOPE this gets Tony Blair punished for all his war crimes, for the death of our sons and all those Iraqis,’ Rose Gentle told News Line yesterday. She was speaking before delivering legal notice to Tony Blair from Military Families Against The War to demand an ‘independent and effective...