Monthly Archives: November 2005
LABOUR premier Tony Blair spoke about the fight against ‘global terrorism’ and called for free-trade ‘globalisation’ in his foreign policy speech at the City of London’s Guildhall on Monday night. Having spent last week as an advocate of the police in the debate on the anti-terror laws, he was addressing...
Three more US marines were killed in western Iraq on Monday, the US military confirmed yesterday. All three, from the 2nd Marine Division, were taking part in Operation Steel Curtain near the Syrian border at the town of Ubaydi. One Marine was killed by a roadside bomb and another was shot...
GATE Gourmet workers are very angry that their union, the TGWU, is still urging them to sign the Compromise Agreement deal negotiated with the company. Speaking on the picket line at Heathrow Airport yesterday, locked out worker Paziter Sanghera told News Line: ‘The union officers are still trying to make...
THE mass picket of over 100 Gate Gourmet workers at Heathrow Airport yesterday were angry at capitalist press revelations that at least two of the victimised BA shop stewards are to be sacked, allegedly at the insistence of BA boss Walsh. Hermohinder Kabra told News Line: ‘The BA workers came...
MORE than 300 youth and workers filled the News Line Anniversary rally at the Park Crescent Conference Centre in central London on Sunday, celebrating 36 years of the daily News Line and commemorating 65 years since the assassination of Leon Trotsky by Stalin’s agents. The rally also celebrated the 10th...
THE former CWU postal workers trade union leader, Alan Johnson, yesterday moved into action at the behest of the Prime Minister to urge that trade union votes should be just 15 per cent of all of the votes cast at the Labour Party conference, not the 50 per cent...
‘The only way to solve the problems facing the working class today is for the working class to take state power and smash capitalism.’ This was the message from Workers Revolutionary Party General Secretary Frank Sweeney to more than 200 workers and youth at the Anniversary Rally, in...
TOMORROW Central Surrey Health (CSH), a private company set up by nurses and therapists, will find out whether they have won the £22m contract to provide community care services for Surrey Health Authority. It is a scandal that nurses have to form a private company in order to keep their...
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas last Friday pledged to continue Yasser Arafat’s struggle to establish a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital, as thousands of Palestinians marked the first anniversary of Arafat’s death. ‘I renew the pledge to continue on the path that he started and exert whatever efforts are...
THIS Sunday’s 65th Anniversary rally of the assassination of Leon Trotsky by an agent of the Stalinist bureaucracy in 1940 is taking place at a time when the rapidly deepening crisis of the world capitalist system is driving forward the world socialist revolution in every part of the planet. The...
THIS speech was delivered on May 9, 1924 during discussions at the Press Department of the Central Committee of the RCP(B) on Party Policy in the Field of Imaginative Literature. The issue was the cultural hot potato of the day, with sections of the party leadership insisting that since...
LOCKED out Gate Gourmet workers were very angry on the picket line at Heathrow Airport yesterday when letters from the TGWU solicitor advising them to sign the hated Compromise Agreement were distributed. Parmjit Baines said: ‘Now we’ve got two letters from the union solicitors, one is confirming that the Employment...
THE US and France yesterday threatened Syria with sanctions. They accused Syrian President Assad of failing to cooperate fully with the UN investigation into the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri. US deputy State Department spokesman Adam Ereli gave President Assad a listen or else warning, He insisted that...
There was a big picket of over 200 locked out Gate Gourmet workers at Heathrow airport yesterday. Locked out worker Ramesh told News Line: ‘I have just received a letter from the company saying my appeal against compulsory redundancy has been rejected. ‘I am not surprised. They don’t want any...
PRIME Minister Blair held a meeting of his Cabinet yesterday morning and, true to form, the Cabinet, filled with his lackeys, found that he was entirely right to push the vote on the 90 days custody issue on behalf of the Metropolitan Police. Blair even remarked that there was a...
THIS speech was delivered on May 9, 1924 during discussions at the Press Department of the Central Committee of the RCP(B) on Party Policy in the Field of Imaginative Literature. The issue was the cultural hot potato of the day, with sections of the party leadership insisting that since...
RMT rail union general secretary Bob Crow repeated a call for Blair to go yesterday in the wake of Wednesday’s Terrorism Bill defeat. Crow said: ‘Blair should have gone ages ago, because of the war on Iraq more than anything else. ‘Apart from making the world less safe, he has made...
THIS speech was delivered on May 9, 1924 during discussions at the Press Department of the Central Committee of the RCP(B) on Party Policy in the Field of Imaginative Literature. The issue was the cultural hot potato of the day, with sections of the party leadership insisting that since...
‘BLAIR should go’, said former Labour minister Glenda Jackson yesterday after a rebellion by 49 Labour MPs saw the government defeated by 322-291 votes in its bid to give the police powers to hold people for 90 days without charge. Jackson said: ‘I regard it as a victory for common...
THE battle lines are being drawn up in the United States between the vanguard of the working class in the auto industry and the big bosses of General Motors, Ford and Daimler Chrysler. At stake are the living standards that the whole of the American working class has built up...
THERE was a mass picket of over 200 locked out Gate Gourmet workers at Heathrow airport yesterday. Senior shop steward Mr Dhillon told News Line: ‘The union has registered everyone’s case for employment tribunals. ‘And the union officials are dealing with the cases.’ Asked if that meant the ‘compromise agreement’ had...
THIS speech was delivered on May 9, 1924 during discussions at the Press Department of the Central Committee of the RCP(B) on Party Policy in the Field of Imaginative Literature. The issue was the cultural hot potato of the day, with sections of the party leadership insisting that since...
AT his monthly press conference last Monday, the Prime Minister admitted that the source of his proposal, that the police should be allowed to hold a person for 90 days without charge, was the police and not the government. He told reporters: ‘This is not a plan dreamed up by...
Locked out Gate Gourmet workers, on their picket line at Heathrow Airport yesterday, spoke out in support of the French airport workers who are today taking action against the transfer of British Airways (BA) workers to cheap labour privateer Globeground. Parmjit Bains said: ‘We send greetings to the French workers....
‘More repression means more destruction’, said defiant French youths yesterday, in answer to the state-of emergency announced by Interior Minister Nicholas Sarkozy. They said curfews ‘won’t change anything’, adding ‘more cops is just provocation, it won’t solve anything’. The French government introduced a state of emergency giving curfew powers to regional...
NEITHER the Gendarmerie, nor troops or even the fatwas of the ‘holy men’ can stop the French youth rebellion, which is the product of years of pauperisation, victimisation and repression of millions of oppressed youth by the arrogant French ruling class and its massive, armed to the...
GATE GOURMET workers were yesterday calling for action to win their jobs back while, at the same time, BA was opening up a second front in France transferring work to the contractor Globeground. The locked out Gate Gourmet workers were very concerned about their colleagues at British Airways who took...
The following is a translation of the first strike bulletin published in the current dispute at French Railways (SNCF) by French railworkers’ union SUD-Rail (Solidarity, Unity Democracy). SUD-Rail calls for a broad, united railworkers’ movement to take all-out, indefinite strike action against privatisation, anti-union laws low wages and attacks on...
Prime Minister Blair yesterday attacked MPs for opposing the police demand for powers to hold people for 90 days without charge. Blair told his monthly press conference that Metropolitan police chiefs Blair and Hayman had told him ‘90 days is necessary’. It was pointed out that he had said that police...
AMID Palestinian ‘deep frustration’ with Israel’s ‘refusal to coordinate in good faith’, an EU delegation arrived on Saturday in Rafah to station security cameras at the Rafah Crossing on the borders between the Gaza Strip and Egypt, the Palestine Media Centre reported yesterday. The EU delegation arrived ahead of visits...
PRIME Minister Blair stands convinced that 90-days internment without charge is not just desirable but is absolutely indispensable for satisfying the Metropolitan Police’s minimum requirements for successfully prosecuting the struggle against ‘terrorism’. While he stands convinced of this and has the support of cabinet ministers such as Tessa Jowell, his...
PALESTINIAN Prime Minister Ahmad Qurei has touched on a number of foreign and domestic policy issues, such as the relations with the USA, the truce with Israel and the economic situation in the Palestinian territory, in an interview with Palestinian TV on the occasion of the Id al-Fitr...
‘We have rejected the deal between the TGWU leaders and Gate Gourmet and put in for our employment tribunals. ‘The TGWU and TUC leaders who negotiated the deal and those other leaders who supported it should all resign.’ Locked-out Gate Gourmet TGWU shop steward Gurdip Hear was speaking...
The Surrey Police re-investigation into the deaths of four teenage recruits at the Deepcut army barracks has been called a ‘farce’ by Geoff Gray, the father of one of the dead teenage soldiers, and has been sharply criticised by Devon and Cornwall Police. In fact, Gray and the other parents...
The Surrey Police re-investigation into the deaths of recruits at the Deepcut army barracks ‘was a farce’ Private Geoff Gray’s father, also named Geoff, said yesterday. He was commenting after the publication of a summary of the sharply critical Devon and Cornwall Police review of the Surrey Police inquiry. Geoff Gray,...
THE Blair government suffered two body-blows yesterday. Blair’s main cabinet ally, Blunkett, was forced to resign, and the government’s 66 majority was reduced to 1, in a vote over the section of his terror bill dealing with glorifying or encouraging terrorism. The Home Secretary, Clarke, has now given up his...
GATE Gourmet workers on the picket line at Heathrow Airport yesterday, said their lobby of the TUC General Council on Wednesday had been very successful. Picket Gurdev told news Line: ‘What we did yesterday was most important. ‘Delegates were shocked when they heard that our own union leader Tony woodley,...
Homeless charity Shelter and the Refugee Council yesterday both welcomed the Law Lords’ unanimous rejection of the controversial law pushed through by former Home Secretary Blunkett which denied welfare support to ‘failed’ asylum seekers. Shelter said Wednesday’s ruling is ‘a human rights victory for homeless people’. Shelter added in its statement:...
There are few union rights, widespread use of child labour and extreme poverty in Bolivia, says the latest International Confederation of Free Trade Unions report. The ICFTU summarises Bolivia’s failure to measure up to internationally-recognised core labour standards in its report for the World Trade Organisation General Council Review of...
YESTERDAY Prime Minister Blair made it clear to the House of Commons during Question Time, that he had urged his Cabinet colleague, Blunkett, not to resign, but to thumb his nose at the House of Commons, and bourgeois democracy. Blair told MPs that none of the allegations against...
THE PALESTINE Media Centre reports that ‘The Israeli Knesset on Monday approved a speech by the Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that vindicated his “defense” minister’s remarks on Friday, which ruled out a Palestinian state or even an “interim accord with the Palestinians in the foreseeable future, thus dooming any...
GATE Gourmet workers lobbied the TUC General Council in central London yesterday. They brought their banner: ‘Justice for the Sacked Gate Gourmet Workers’ and placards saying: ‘No to the Sell-Out Deal’; ‘Reinstatement for All’; ‘TUC Act Now, Get Our Jobs Back’ and ‘TGWU Leaders Don’t Play With Our Jobs’. Parmjit...
Announcing Blunkett’s resignation as Work and Pensions Secretary to MPs yesterday, Prime Minister Blair made it clear he had been ready to defy the rules and keep his long-standing ally in the Cabinet. Blair said Blunkett had been ‘doing an important and vital job for this country and we...
AMNESTY International said yesterday that recent revelations about deaths in custody and abuses by US troops in Afghanistan are further evidence of a culture of disrespect for fundamental rights in the ‘war on terror’ which the US has failed to adequately address. Earlier this month it was reported that US...