Monthly Archives: March 2006
‘HYPOCRISY!’ That was the reaction of angry firefighters picketing Downing Street on Wednesday night – disgusted that crews who fought the giant Buncefield oil depot blaze, last December, were being invited in for a ‘do’, at the same time as being threatened with the sack! More than 100 Fire Brigades...
‘Flaws in the Payment by Results (PbR) system mean that whole hospital departments could be unfairly closed down as “inefficient”,’ warns the British Medical Association (BMA). An example of this danger is given in the latest edition of its membership magazine, BMA News. The government claims its new payments system is...
A VIDEO showing President George W Bush being warned on the eve of Hurricane Katrina that the storm could breach New Orleans’ flood defences has emerged and been shown. However, four days after Katrina hit New Orleans and flooded a good part of the city Bush said: ‘I don’t...
‘THE TGWU leaders are doing everything they can to try to make us give up the fight and sign the Compromise Agreement but we won’t sign,’ Asha Varma told News Line yesterday. Speaking on the hill near Heathrow Airport, Terminal Four, where the Gate Gourmet locked-out workers have picketed every...
A letter from the Chairman of the Professional Executive Committee, High Peak and Dales Primary Care Trust (PCT) to clinicians reveals the devastating impact on NHS budgets and patient care of the government’s new Payment by Results system. The letter from Doctor Mike Chadwick outlines a proposal to suspend...
PRESIDENT Bush yesterday spent five hours in Afghanistan, most of it at the very heavily defended Bagram airport. He could not venture any further because his safety could not be guaranteed outside of about 50 square miles of Afghanistan. While there he stated emphatically that Iran would not be...
‘Will the present inquiry by the Cabinet Secretary examine whether or not the Home Office acted improperly in relation to an extradition request for Mr Mills?’ Tory MP Richard Bacon asked Prime Minister Blair yesterday. The MP was referring to documents from the Italian prosecutor’s office in Milan, which accuse...
THE government has published its Education Bill, with up to 100 Labour MPs still opposed to it. The Education and Inspection Bill allows schools in England to set up independent ‘trusts’, which can link up with other schools, which have control over their own assets, and can go into partnership...
‘We are not against improving patient referral standards, but we are opposed to referral management to cut costs and ration treatment,’ British Medical Association GP Committee chairman Dr Hamish Meldrum told a BMA press conference yesterday. Referral Management Schemes which intervene in the patient’s care pathway from GP to hospital...
‘OUR march through Hounslow on Saturday 25th of March is very important, not just for us but for all trade union members.’ Locked-out Gate Gourmet worker Parmjeet Sidhu was speaking at the Beacon Roundabout, near Heathrow Airport’s Terminal Four, where the TGWU members have picketed every day since August 10th...
THE Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, last Sunday issued a statement headlined ‘PFLP condemns occupation onslaught against our people in Nablus and Gaza and threats to assassinate Secretary-General Ahmad Sa’dat’. An official spokesman for the PFLP also denounced the organised onslaught by the occupation government and its...