Monthly Archives: March 2006
LEADERS of France’s main trade union federations have refused to talk to the government until it withdraws the CPE (first job contract) that removes the employment rights of young people under 26, which has sparked a general uprising across the country. More than three million youth and workers took...
THE British Medical Association (BMA) yesterday said it was astonished at the vindictive and petty treatment of consultants by the government awarding them a phased below inflation, pay rise. The independent Doctors Dentists Review Body (DDRB) has recommended a pay award of 2.2 per cent for most doctors. Staff and associate...
Students’ expenditure has gone up 44 per cent in real terms under the three Labour governments, an official Student Income and Expenditure survey has found. The average student expenditure was £6,161 a year in 1998-99 and £10,273 last year. Total average income for full-time students rose 46 per cent to...
rail union RMT warned on Tuesday that the new Integrated Kent Franchise that begins on April 1, 2006 could result in the removal of staff from stations and guards from trains. The union issued the warning after a detailed study of the Invitation to Tender document it requested from...
Fears of massive anti-war protests forced the cancellation of yesterday’s planned visit to Blackburn by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Rice had planned to visit Blackburn, UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw’s constituency, to repay his visit to her home town in Alabama in 2005. However, she was due to be...
Yesterday Geoff Gray refused to accept the conclusion of the ‘independent review’ into four deaths at Deepcut barracks, that his son committed suicide. Gray, whose son is also called Geoff, is one of the Deepcut four families. The young Geoff Gray was found dead with two bullet wounds in his head. Challenging...
PRESIDENT Bush has fallen out with the major section of his puppet regime in Iraq, that is the Dawa Party and the United Iraq Alliance movement, whose leaders spent many years in Iran, and returned to Iraq in the wake of the US and British armies in May 2003. The...
‘I’m ecstatic to see the people out on the picket line today, from different unions – TGWU, GMB, UNISON – it’s inspiring,’ east London UNISON member Mike Murat enthused to News Line, Tuesday morning. He was taking part in the massive over one million-strong pensions strike by local government workers...
IT is Tuesday, 3.00pm in Paris and people are still pouring into Place D’Italie for the start of the latest massive anti-government demonstration by youth and workers demanding the withdrawal of the CPE (first job contract). For the first time since the movement began, a general strike is taking place...
YESTERDAY’s massive one-day strike stopped whole regions of the UK, but is only the start of the campaign, local government workers warned. Striking local government workers packing out Central Halls, Westminster, shouted slogans at the end of the rally demanding a national march to take the fight forward to defend...
IT was Karl Marx who said that the French would start the revolution, that the British would be inspired to take it further and that the Germans would complete it. Revolutionary France has played that role throughout modern history. The revolution of 1789 destroyed feudalism throughout Europe as well as...
‘It’s going well, union members are not coming in. Obviously, we want to protect our pensions,’ Camden UNISON housing department shop steward Lesley Amber told News Line yesterday. She was speaking at one of the many picket lines across the country on the morning of yesterday’s pensions strike by over...
Public services often fail to consider the special needs of older people, who are being treated like ‘second class citizens’, Age Concern said yesterday. It was commenting on a new report by the Healthcare Commission, the Audit Commission and the Commission for Social Care Inspection. This found ‘evidence of a lack...
YESTERDAY in Australia, Blair, for all he was worth, was pushing the George Bush imperialist line that ‘we’ have a duty to liberate the world, so that human beings can be given a ‘fair go’ and better themselves. He must be talking about Iraq and the 100,000 corpses that the...
UNISON leader Dave Prentis yesterday confessed that local government union leaders were unwilling combatants with the Blair government, over its plan to smash their members’ final salary pensions and add five years to their retirement age, increasing it from 60 to 65. Prentis said referring to tomorrow’s strike: ‘We never...
Last weekend saw united action by German and British Gate Gourmet workers against the company’s savage attacks on their jobs, wages and conditions. The weekend began with a picket of Texas Pacific Group’s London offices (It is the owner of Gate Gourmet) in Pall Mall, Friday lunchtime and continued Friday...
BEFORE News Line arrived in Paris, there had been reports of French riot police charging at thousands of youth occupying the railway station in Nantes, western France, during a national day of action on Tuesday March 14 – firing tear gas at them. Outside the Sorbonne University in Paris, from...
TWENTY SIX Gate Gourmet strikers and supporters from Düsseldorf, Germany, arrived in London yesterday to join Gate Gourmet locked-out workers from Heathrow. They met at a picket of the Texas Pacific company, and will be joining today’s Gate Gourmet locked-out workers’ march through Hounslow. Texas Pacific is Gate Gourmet’s US owner,...
THE News Line sends greetings to the striking German and the locked-out British Gate Gourmet workers, who are today marching through Hounslow. The German workers are on strike against the attacks of the Gate Gourmet employer, whilst the British workers have been locked out since August 10th 2005, when Gate...
GATE Gourmet locked-out workers, at Heathrow Airport, are welcoming Gate Gourmet striking workers, from Dusseldorf Airport in Germany, to London today. The British Gate Gourmet workers got great support while out campaigning yesterday. At Southall Fire Station FBU branch secretary Jack Jackiewicz donated £10 to their dispute fund saying: ‘You have...
THE CRS and gendarmerie have remained on the streets of Paris since the uprising sparked by the violent state attack on demonstrators at Place de la Nation, at the end of last Saturday’s massive, 500,000-plus march against the government. The march was called to oppose the government’s CPE (First Job...
British Airways announced yesterday it has drawn up ‘a proposal to clear the £1 billion past service actuarial deficit in its New Airways Pension Scheme (NAPS)’. BA said it plans to keep a final salary pension scheme with no changes to pension benefits already earned and no increase...
THE TUC and all trade unions must be made to take action to defend the NHS before it is butchered by Blair and completely privatised by the Tories. In the last week alone, notice has been given that more than 2,000 jobs are to be cut...
Chancellor Gordon Brown delivered his 10th Budget yesterday featuring more tax cuts for the rich and pay cuts for the working class. Opening his speech to MPs in the House of Commons, Brown claimed: ‘The British economy is strong and strengthening. ‘I can report that inflation is currently two per cent,...
TWO Gate Gourmet locked-out workers went to the TGWU London South East and East Anglia Regional Office in north London on Tuesday, to ask for their hardship payments. The union members, two of the 760 workers, who were locked out on August 10 last year, have not received any hardship...
CHANCELLOR Gordon Brown yesterday could not see and would not even hear of a crisis in the British capitalist economy that he has presided over for the last nine years. No doubt he is hoping for a crisis-free shoeing into Blair’s job, and does not want to even think of...
GATE Gourmet locked-out workers are getting great support for their march through Hounslow on Saturday. Saturday’s march assembles at 1.00pm (see advert on this page) and finishes with a rally at Hounslow Civic Centre. Jaggi Vadgama, chairman of the TGWU at Travel London buses said: ‘These fellow members are victimised...
Iraqi insurgents freed 33 of their comrades in a daring pre-dawn raid on a puppet authority jail north of Baghdad yesterday. At least 18 puppet Iraqi police officers and a courthouse guard were killed in a fierce battle during the half-hour raid, which targeted a compound consisting of the main police...
PRIME MINISTER Blair yesterday suffered a setback when the Labour Party’s NEC decided that it was going to take back control over the party’s funds, including the collection of donations and loans. The Executive had been discussing a report by LP Treasurer Jack Dromey and General Secretary Peter Watt over...
TWO Gate Gourmet locked-out workers went to the TGWU London South East and East Anglia Regional Office in north London yesterday, to ask for their hardship payments. The union members, who have been locked out since August 10 last year, have not received any hardship payment from the union since...
Confidential documents passed to Hertfordshire’s Fire Brigades Union (FBU) show that confidential proposals have earmarked SEVEN more fire stations for either closure or downgrading, the FBU revealed on Monday. The document suggests the current proposals may simply be the thin end of the wedge of major cuts across the fire...
The United States military is investigating whether US Marines who killed 15 civilians, including women and children, near the western Iraqi town of Haditha last November carried out a deliberate massacre. Already there are witnesses who have said that the Marines carried out a massacre of innocents, in a revenge...
RIGHT on cue the European election monitors have said that the re-election of President Lukhashenka was flawed and failed to meet international standards. An EU commissioner added that it was ‘very likely’ the EU will impose sanctions on Belarus. Meanwhile, the opposition was demonstrating in the main Minsk square,...
British lawyers representing the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Ahmed Saadat, are considering suing the British Foreign Office over its decision to withdraw monitors from a West Bank jail minutes before Israeli occupation troops stormed the compound and detained the Palestinian leader. Two Palestinian...
GATE Gourmet locked-out workers are campaigning all week for their march through Hounslow this Saturday. Yesterday morning a delegation of locked-out workers visited Greenford Royal Mail sorting office. They met CWU rep Michelle Laidlaw, who took posters and leaflets saying: ‘We will definitely be there. This struggle is important for all...
50,000 workers and youth marched through London last Saturday, as part of the many demonstrations worldwide to mark the third anniversary of the war and occupation of Iraq. As well as Stop the War and CND groups from around the country, there were many trade union delegations, including those from...
IRAQ is in the middle of a civil war, the country’s former interim puppet prime minister, Iyad Allawi, said yesterday. Allawi was appointed by the US administrator of Iraq, Paul Bremer. The man who returned to Iraq with the imperialist forces in March 2003 was in fact warning...
The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) yesterday warned against any ‘quick fix’ plan to keep asthma and heart patients out of hospital ‘just to save money.’ Announcing plans for NHS ‘care in the community’ today Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt is recommending people are treated in their homes to save...
‘We are going to fight the compulsory redundancies,’ West Midlands UNISON regional officer Opinder Tiwana told News Line yesterday, in the wake of University Hospital of North Staffordshire NHS Trust’s plans to axe 1,000 jobs from a workforce of 7,000 – 750 of them compulsory redundancies. UNISON regional officer Tiwana...
‘WE want all trade unionists and everyone who supports the working class to come to our march next Saturday,’ Gate Gourmet locked-out worker Raksha Sharma said yesterday whilst campaigning around west London bus garages. The Gate Gourmet locked-out workers are fighting for reinstatement and demanding that their union, the TGWU,...
OVER half a million high school youth, unemployed youth, university students and workers demonstrated across France on Thursday, March 16. Millions of workers and youth will be marching today (Saturday March 18) led by the main trade union federations. They are marching for a future for all youth...
THE just announced 1,000 strong mass sackings at the University Hospital of North Staffordshire which includes 750 compulsory redundancies, as well as 370 nurses and midwives, shows the entire NHS its future under the Blair-Brown privatisation programme. One seventh of the workforce is to go because of a government...
‘IT’S wrong that Downing Street thinks it can run the Labour Party: we are an elected party, a democratic party,’ said the Labour Party treasurer, TGWU official Jack Dromey yesterday. He added that he and the Labour party chairman knew nothing about million pound loans from businessmen, and that...