Monthly Archives: September 2005
Increased competition in the NHS could jeopardise the quality of doctors’ training, the new leader of the UK’s 49,000 junior doctors warned on Thursday as the Blair government’s policy was defeated at the Labour Party conference. Dr Jo Hilborne, who has been elected chairman of the BMA’s Junior Doctors...
THE GATE GOURMET bosses were cock-a-hoop yesterday, and no wonder – after the leader of the TUC, Barber, and the leaders of the TGWU agreed to 140 compulsory redundancies and to just 400 of the 710 locked-out workers returning to work, and to the company ‘survival plan’ which...
ANGRY Gate Gourmet workers were on the picket line yesterday after Wednesday’s sell-out deal between the Transport and General Workers’ Union leaders, TUC leaders and the company. Odedra told News Line: ‘The union leaders have sold us. ‘The company has got everything it wanted: compulsory redundancy for those it wants to...
After cancelling a planned October 2 meeting with Israeli premier Ariel Sharon, Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas and his delegation arrived in Cairo on Tuesday evening on a two-day visit to Egypt. Abbas has been holding talks with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak as the EU and Britain claimed to be leading...
YESTERDAY, the parents of Jean Charles de Menezes retraced the final journey taken by their son, an entirely innocent man who was shot dead by anti-terrorism police with seven shots to the head and one to the shoulder, at Stockwell Tube station on July 22. They demanded that there be...
TGWU leader Tony Woodley told the mass meeting of locked out Gate Gourmet workers yesterday afternoon that the sell out deal he has negotiated for mass sackings ‘is not a perfect solution to mission impossible.’ He added: ‘It is a package that eventually every individual member must accept.’ Coming out...
Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas said on Sunday that the latest Israeli military escalation has ‘shot down the efforts to advance the peace process’ after Israel’s pullout from the Gaza Strip. And he declared he would not be meeting Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on October 2nd as planned. ‘There won’t be...
A MASS meeting of the 710 TGWU trade union members, sacked and locked-out at Gate Gourmet, will take place at the Monsoon Club in Southall, this afternoon. At this meeting TGWU officials will outline a deal, agreed under the auspices of Brendan Barber, the General Secretary of the Trades Union...
‘WE want a hands up vote at the mass meeting tomorrow, and we want the provisional agreement between Gate Gourmet, the TGWU and the TUC rejected,’ said locked out Gate Gourmet worker, Parmjit Bains. She added on the picket line yesterday, ‘For those they have back, they will cut out...
SHOCKING new allegations of the systematic and barbaric torture of Iraqi detainees by US troops have been released by Human Rights Watch. Several US soldiers approached the organisation and told it that from 2003 to 2004, US Army troops subjected Iraqi detainees to severe beatings and other torture at...
CHANCELLOR Gordon Brown, the pretender to the Labour leadership and 10 Downing Street, told the Labour Party conference in Brighton yesterday: ‘Our mission is “new” Labour renewed.’ In his keynote speech, Brown avoided any reference to the present crisis of the British capitalist economy, where manufacturing industry is being decimated,...
In his keynote speech to the Labour Party Conference yesterday, Chancellor Gordon Brown declared for ‘New Labour renewed’. Assuming he will succeed Blair as Labour leader and prime minister, Brown proceeded to lay out his Thatcherite ‘vision’ of a ‘home-owning, share-owning, asset-owning, wealth-owning democracy’. He began his speech by paying...
Hundreds of angry postal workers are lobbying the Labour Party conference in Brighton today against government plans to privatise Royal Mail. Communication Workers’ Union (CWU) members will muster outside the conference at noon. A spokesman said the planned protest is part of the CWU campaign to draw attention to ‘the damage...
THE Israeli government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has launched a new war on Palestinians living in territories under Zionist occupation less than three weeks after settlers and troops left the Gaza Strip. After putting in place the so-called ‘Security Wall’ on Palestinian land around Jerusalem and the West Bank,...
MORE than 50,000 people marched from Parliament Square to Hyde Park on Saturday to demand the immediate withdrawal of British troops from Iraq. At the same time over 100,000 people marched in Washington to demand US troops quit the Middle East and there were demonstrations in The Hague in Holland...
OVER 100,000 will be gathering in central London today, on the eve of the Labour Party conference, to demand the withdrawal of British and American troops from Iraq. An anti-war rally is also taking place today in the US capital, Washington, calling for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. Organisers,...
MORE than 100,000 people are expected to take part in the anti-war demonstration in London today, according to its organisers, the Stop the War Coalition. The organisers are calling for an end to the war in Iraq, an end to its occupation and for British troops to be withdrawn by...
The coming clash between the trade unions and the Labour government over plans to step up the privatisation of the NHS was yesterday given greater impetus. ‘Strictly confidential’ documents obtained by the Hospital Doctor magazine revealed that Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt intends to privatise NHS staff, as well...
THE GATE Gourmet mass picket at Heathrow airport was visited by Transport and General Workers Union General Secretary Tony Woodley and the union’s General Executive Council yesterday morning. The workers heard speakers tell that the negotiations with Gate Gourmet are resuming today, and that three British Airways shop stewards have...
Russia on Wednesday opposed an EU draft resolution that seeks to have Iran referred to the UN Security Council and warned against escalating the standoff with Tehran. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in a speech in San Francisco: ‘While Iran is cooperating with the IAEA, while it is not...
Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, presented his ‘wish list’ of latest demands to the Labour government, when speaking to the Police Superintendents’ Conference on Wednesday. He told these senior police officers: ‘We need to decide what constables can do which they are not allowed to do now. We need...
THE Gaza Strip-Egypt border will reopen only as part of an international agreement, Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas has said, after Palestinian security forces sealed off the southern border on Sunday. ‘The terminal will be open when there is an international agreement,’ Abbas said. Media reports claimed that Israel had agreed ‘in...
TALKS at Congress House last Tuesday, between the Trades Union Congress, the T&G and Gate Gourmet management were busy discussing the company’s ‘compromise agreement’. Gate Gourmet are insisting that all workers sign away their right to claim unfair dismissal at an Industrial Tribunal, before any of the locked-out workers are...
LOCKED out Gate Gourmet workers received a report back yesterday morning on the picket line at Heathrow Airport from their shop stewards, of a meeting they had attended at the TUC the day before. Senior steward Mr Dhillon said: ‘Twenty-one shop stewards were there and on Friday the meeting is...
‘This militarisation of the police will increase the risk that we run already, not just to our civil liberties but to our very safety,’ Labour MP John McDonnell told news Line yesterday. He was responding to yesterday’s suggestion by Metropolitan Police commissioner Sir Ian Blair that police forces could employ...
British troops in Iraq were on high alert yesterday for fear of further clashes as tensions continued over the rescue at tank-point of two British undercover soldiers. The Ministry of Defence confirmed to News Line yesterday that warrior tanks had breached an Iraqi jail compound. The MoD claimed no shots...
GATE Gourmet shop stewards went to a meeting at the Trades Union Congress in central London yesterday with leaders of their union, the TGWU, and the TUC. They were expecting to hear of a proposed settlement to their six-week dispute. Locked out Gate Gourmet workers insisted yesterday morning that they would...
THE Labour Government’s Defence Secretary, John Reid, declared yesterday that sending six Warrior tanks to demolish the wall of a prison compound in Basra, to release two members of British special forces, was perfectly ‘legal’. Reid was justifying something which was described by Mohammed al-Waili (the Iraqi Governor of Basra...
THE Basra office of militant Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has said a former Basra commander of the Al-Sadr movement’s Mahdi Army showed ‘signs of torture’ after being arrested and released by British soldiers on Sunday. A source at the al-Sadr Office said on Sunday that British forces had released Ahmad...
‘Fewer employers are offering health benefits to workers, even as premiums continue to rise, posting a 9.2 per cent increase in 2005 – three times the increase in workers’ wages’, says the AFL-CIO US labour federation. It added last weekend: ‘The 2005 Employer Health Benefits Annual Survey provides a detailed look...
AFTER Sunday’s General Election, Germany did not have a Chancellor, or a government yesterday. This plunged the country into a huge economic and political crisis, with reverberations throughout the European Union (EU). Weeks of coalition wrangling are expected, involving Angela Merkel of the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Gerhard Schroeder...
SHOP Stewards representing the 670 locked out Gate Gourmet workers are meeting Transport and General Workers Union General Secretary Tony Woodley at the union’s head office in London at midday today. Workers on the picket line at Heathrow Airport told News Line yesterday that they would not accept the ‘compromise...
AS many as 3,000 junior doctors are unable to find posts and are being driven to seek work either abroad or outside the NHS, according to research carried out by the British Medical Association in August and released today. A BMA statement yesterday said: ‘The BMA calls on the Department...
ISRAEL’S Prime Minister Ariel Sharon tried to cut a figure as the liberator of the Palestinian people of the Gaza Strip at the United Nations General Assembly last Thursday. The Zionist leader’s imperialist backers, primarily the US and Britain, piled on their praises for Sharon in New York after Israel’s...
A pensions strike at Grampian Foods, which supplies meat to Britain’s supermarkets, could soon hit shelf supplies, warned the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU) yesterday. Around 1,000 workers at Grampian Foods have voted by a margin of three to two to strike to defend their final salary pensions. The first...
GATE Gourmet workers are opposing a ‘compromise agreement’, which the company and leaders of the Transport and General Workers’ Union are negotiating and which involves compulsory redundancies and loss of unfair dismissal rights. On the picket line on Sunday, Parmjit Bains told News Line: ‘Yesterday one of the union officers...
Three presidents – Lula da Silva of Brazil, Luis Rodriguez Zapatero of Spain and Nestor Kirchner of Argentina – cancelled an appearance scheduled for today at New York University, the Union of Auto Workers (UAW) said last Friday. The US union added: ‘The three presidents, in New York for a...
MORE THAN 100 youth won enthusiastic support from shoppers as they marched with the Young Socialists through Birmingham city centre on Saturday afternoon, as the YS campaign against curfews and ASBOs and bans on hoods and caps continued. This was the second march in the YS campaign after a successful...
THE intervention at the TUC Congress last Monday by the Gate Gourmet locked out workers was an outstanding success. It let every delegate of every TUC affiliated trade union know that the locked out workers do not want redundancy, and all want their jobs back on the current terms...
The European Court of Human Rights is considering an important case for returning Croatian Serb refugees, says Amnesty International. The Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms is considering Blecic v. Croatia, ‘a case that could impact the fate of tens of thousands of...
AT the just concluded TUC Congress, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, openly condemned the description of ‘globalisation’ as ‘a race to the bottom’. Brown insisted that the answer to globalisation lay not in trying to protect workers’ jobs but ‘in radically upgrading our skills, science and technology’. This statement...
Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas said on Tuesday that the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) was ready to ‘engage immediately in negotiations on the final status’ of the Palestinian territories with the Israeli occupying power. He added that ‘armed chaos’ and ‘security anarchy’ will no longer be tolerated, as his chief of...