Monthly Archives: June 2005
Human rights group Liberty yesterday condemned the huge increase in the number of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (Asbos) issued as the government steps up its attacks on youth. Liberty Director-General Sami Chakrabati said: ‘My concern is that this policy is in danger of getting out of control. ‘There’s too much concern...
Last week saw the annual conference of UNISON, the largest public sector union in the country. As befits a union that represents hundreds of thousands of predominantly low paid workers in the public sector, all the main issues confronting the working class today were on the agenda. And one of...
Iran’s president-elect Mahmood Ahmadinejad has hailed his election win as a new Islamic revolution which he said he hoped would now spread its way throughout the world. ‘Thanks to the blood of the martyrs, a new Islamic revolution has arisen and the Islamic revolution of 1384 (the current Iranian year)...
MPs yesterday raised questions about the ID card Bill which was introduced in the House of Commons by Home Secretary Charles Clarke. Clarke said he would deal with concerns ‘raised around the big brother society, cost, benefits to individuals and society, questions of services access and safegards.’ In the debate during...
THE new puppet Prime Minister of Iraq, Jaffari, has just visited both Washington and London to make sure that a beleaguered President Bush and his chief supporter Blair have no intention of quitting Iraq. The matter is literally a life or death question for Jaffari, since his regime will not...
THE Teamsters General President James Hoffa gave the fraternal address from the AFL-CIO US trade union federation to the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) Bi-Annual Convention. This was held in Belfast and Hoffa addressed it on June 21. He told delegates in his speech: ‘In the United States, we face...
PRIVATE Treatment Centres have become a key element in the Labour Government’s plans to privatise the National Health Service (NHS). They are being used in conjunction with the forcible diversion of NHS patients into the private sector ‘patient choice’ and the introduction of the market, to destroy NHS hospitals. They are...
‘It should have been a murder case’, said Sophie Hurndall, the sister of Tom Hurndall yesterday. She was speaking to reporters just after her brother’s killer, former Israeli Army sergeant Wahid Taysir had been convicted of manslaughter by an Israeli military tribunal. Tom Hurndall was shot in the head from an...
WITH Coral Eurobet the bookmakers now the most successful British company, with a turnover of £5.4 billion, and with manufacturing industry being slaughtered, no wonder the Bank of England is desperately worried about the developing economic crisis. This forced it to break cover on Monday to warn that the combination...
Yesterday claims were made that the government was in discussions with businesses on the sale of personal information that will be contained in the proposed ID cards. Ahead of tomorrow’s debate in the House of Commons, it was claimed that businesses were being offered access to personal details for sums...
THERE is a huge funding crisis in the National Health Service (NHS). All over the country hospitals are being instructed to close wards and theatres and cut staff in order to reduce so-called ‘overspends’. For example, St George’s Tooting has debts of £24m and is closing 60 beds and three wards;...
LABOUR’S policy of privatising the NHS by diverting huge chunks of the NHS budget to the private sector is preparing the bankruptcy of many NHS hospitals. Such cash-strapped NHS hospitals will be deemed to have failed, and there is no doubt that Blair intends to hand them and their...
Delegates at the UNISON National Delegate Conference in Glasgow yesterday said it was ‘government policy’ to drive NHS trusts into the red. Delegates slammed Labour over privatisation and the return of the Tory market. The debate on Motion 61 ‘Developing a UNISON Vision of the NHS’ came on the day that...
DELEGATES at the UNISON national delegate conference last Thursday passed a motion demanding the withdrawal of all British troops from Iraq by the end of this year. The motion was passed overwhelmingly with the union’s deputy general secretary, Keith Sonnett, saying that he would have voted against a motion...
PUBLIC sector union UNISON finds itself in conflict with employers using equal opportunity legislation supposed to protect the most vulnerable workers, to oppress them instead. Members of Coventry UNISON lobbied the National Delegate Conference on Tuesday for support in their struggle against pay cuts. The branch is holding a Local Government...
BLAIR’S call for Thatcherism throughout Europe has won him the immediate support of all Tories and right wingers, even those who had been portraying themselves as being fanatically anti-EU, valuing British sovereignty more than life itself. With one bound he has become the leader of the right wing, the Tories,...
Delegates at UNISON’s National Delegate Conference in Glasgow voted overwhelmingly yesterday to demand British and US troops are withdrawn from Iraq by the end of this year. NEC Motion 112 called for British and US Governments to ‘Set out precise timetables for the early withdrawal of all troops, but certainly...
‘THE threat we made to the government still stands – revoke the order or there will be a strike on pensions,’ UNISON NEC member Jane Carolan told the union’s National Delegate Conference in Glasgow yesterday. Moving Motion 21, ‘UNISON’s Pension Campaign’, she insisted: ‘Every member in every branch in every...
THE US through its secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, who has been in the Middle East for a week, is working hard to raise tensions and prepare new wars throughout the region. Yesterday the US blamed Syria for the assassination of the Lebanese ex-Communist Party leader, George Hawi. White House spokesman...
THE statements by American Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on her visits to Tel Aviv and Ramallah are ‘aggressive and anti-Palestinian’, the Palestinian resistance movement Islamic Jihad has said. Rice described the resistance in Palestine as terrorism and called on the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmud Abbas, to fight...
‘WE will take strike action, across all our sectors, to defend our pensions,’ UNISON General Secretary Dave Prentis pledged at the union’s National Delegate Conference in Glasgow yesterday. In his keynote speech to the conference, he said: ‘We will fight proposals to increase the retirement age and cut benefits. We...
YESTERDAY the PR company representing Live8, LD Publicity, refused to deny media allegations that Bob Geldof, the Live8 movement’s leader, had a soft spot for the blood-soaked US President George Bush, and was taking steps to ensure that none of the pop stars appearing at the various pop concerts...
Leading Republican Senator Chuck Hagel has warned the US is ‘losing in Iraq’. He slammed the George W Bush administration’s Iraq policy as ‘disconnected from reality’. Hagel, a leading Republican Senator who is said to have presidential aspirations, said on Sunday that ‘things aren’t getting better, they’re getting worse’ in Iraq. He...
FIFTY EIGHT per cent of graduates find they are still relying on their parents for financial support three years after graduation, a survey commissioned by the Royal Bank of Scotland shows. Many of these students are still living at home three years after leaving university, and admit that they could...
On Sunday RAF G4 Tornado warplanes attacked the Iraqi town of Karabilah, near the Syrian border. The British were called to assist US Air Force F-16 jets and Super Cobra helicopter gunships. The deadly raids continued under the title Operation Spear in al-Anbar, which began last Friday. Houses and vehicles were destroyed...
British warplanes yesterday bombed vehicles and buildings in the northwestern Iraqi town of Karabila, close to the Syrian border. In what was considered a rare departure from operations in the south of the country, RAF G-4 Tornado jets used laser-guided bombs and missiles in a joint operation with the United...
ROYAL Air Force Tornado fighter bombers have joined the US air force in bombing raids in Iraq’s western Al Anbar province, particularly in the area along Iraq’s border with Syria. The US has been saying for some time that Arab volunteers and Syrian nationals have been crossing that border into...
The Refugee Council has welcomed today’s publication of a new Amnesty International UK report on detention of asylum seekers ‘The Human Cost of Detention’. Maeve Sherlock, Chief Executive of the Refugee Council said: ‘We warmly welcome this vital and timely report. ‘As the government plans to expand the use of...
THE current Blair drive to have Gordon Brown and himself depicted in the media as the saviours of the African continent has hit the rocks, with the BMA-RCN exposure that British policy is, and has been for a number of years, to poach thousands of African doctors and nurses...
THE following is a statement by Joe Hansen, International President of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, made at the ‘Change To Win’ Coalition meeting last Wednesday to ‘rebuild’ the US labour movement. ‘Yesterday, the International Executive Board of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW)...
Doctors’ and nurses’ leaders have written letters to Prime Minister Blair and Chancellor Brown urging Britain and other G8 nations to stop poaching doctors and nurses from the poor nations of Africa and other continents. British Medical Association Chairman James Johnson and Royal College of Nursing General Secretary Beverly Malone...
A NATIONAL day of action in support of asylum seekers and migrant workers is taking place in Ireland tomorrow, Saturday June 18. A rally has been organised by Residents Against Racism at the General Post Office in O’Connell Street, Dublin. Residents Against Racism said yesterday: ‘Michael McDowell’s deportation machine has got...
Five US marines have been killed near Ramadi, western Iraq, when their vehicle struck a roadside bomb, the US military said in a statement yesterday. The military statement gave no more details of the attack which took place on Wednesday evening. But it confirmed it was the second time in a...
THE American workers are facing major problems, caused by the deepening crisis of the world capitalist system. Among these problems are the export of millions of US workers’ jobs by the employers, and the growth of long term unemployment. This is at the same time as productivity is being driven...
The leaders of five of the largest unions in the AFL-CIO – the Teamsters, UFCW, UNITE-HERE, Laborers’, and SEIU – held a ‘Change to Win’ press conference yesterday, at 12.30pm at the Laborers’ International Union of North America headquarters. They announced the creation of a new multi-union organisation to address...
LABOUR’S war against the working class and the poor continues, with Birkenhead MP Frank Field advocating that nuisance neighbours should be evicted and ‘housed’ in steel containers in compounds on the outskirts of Britain’s cities and towns. No doubt, they will be enclosed by razor wire and high fences, and...
The House of Commons Council Housing Group of MPs from all parties yesterday launched its report Support for the Fourth Option for Council Housing. This report is born out of demands from council tenants and trade unions for the end of John Prescott’s ideological campaign against council owned housing and...
Staff at United Lincolnshire Hospitals NHS Trust have been shocked by the sudden announcement on Monday of plans to close five hospital wards and axe 300 jobs. East Midlands UNISON yesterday voiced its concerns over the number of job losses planned by NHS trusts across Lincolnshire. It said in a statement:...
THE Blair government has only one real use for the EU, and that is as a tool for cutting the wages and increasing the exploitation of the British working class. This policy has been greeted with great enthusiasm by the Bank of England governor, Mervyn King. He has greeted with...
The Islamic Army in Iraq last Sunday, in a videotape, claimed responsibility for an attack with an explosive device against a US foot patrol in the area of Al-Yusufiyah, south of Baghdad. Meanwhile, the residents of Al-Karabilah, near the city of Al-Qaim (near Syrian border), have condemned the US occupiers...
The Russian ambassador to Iraq yesterday flew to Najaf and started talks with leading Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who led the uprising against US forces in central Iraq last year. Ambassador Vladimir Chamov was making the first ever visit by a Russian envoy to al-Sadr’s office. Sheikh Jalil al-Nouri, an al-Sadr...
THE knives are out between the British ruling class and its Franco-German opposite numbers. The press conference at the end of Blair’s visit to Moscow, yesterday afternoon, saw Blair nervously rehearsing just what he is to tell the German and French leaders when they meet today. Blair said that he would...
AT ONE time it used to be said that British workers were working such long hours that they did not have an opportunity to spend time with their children, who hardly knew their fathers, in particular. It was mooted that progress would mean a cut in working hours and a...
‘The BBC unions agreed ‘a trawl for voluntary redundancies’ during last Wednesday’s four-hour meeting with BBC Director General Mark Thompson. Thompson would give no guarantee over compulsory redundancies, but reiterated the BBC offer of a moratorium for a year, during which time BBC bosses will be looking for voluntary redundancies. BECTU...