Monthly Archives: May 2006
MORE than 20,000 German doctors are taking strike action all this week demanding a cut in working hours and a 30-per-cent pay rise. The strike is the biggest ever health service workers’ strike in Germany and hospitals are providing only emergency services. German doctors are contracted to work 40 hours...
THE visit of the left bourgeois nationalist leaders Evo Morales of Bolivia and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela to Europe is much appreciated, and is a timely reminder of the worldwide nature of the struggle against imperialism; and that the masses of South America, the Middle East and many other...
The proposal by Stena Line to introduce a low-waged Polish crew on their Stena Seatrader ferry on the Dublin/Holyhead route from next July was yesterday condemned by International Transport Federation Inspector, Tony Ayton. ‘While the nationality of the crew on any vessel is not an issue for the trade union...
Communication Workers Union (CWU) leaders Billy Hayes and Dave Ward have written to every member of the union informing them that the leadership is putting down a motion for national industrial action at the CWU annual conference this weekend. This is in response to Royal Mail’s announcement that it...
Campaigners angry over plans to axe services at a community hospital in Shropshire will be confronting health officials at a public meeting tomorrow. Residents are determined to save a mental health ward from closure at Ludlow Hospital. The trust says that the closure is part of its plan to...
A TOP secret Wal-Mart memo obtained by WakeUpWalMart.com shows how Wal-Mart is exerting corporate pressure to force suppliers to join a right-wing front group bought and paid for by Wal-Mart. The memo reads: ‘Memorandum to Retail Link Users Group Leaders from: Terry Nelson, Working Families for...
THE Prime Minister, Tony Blair, has had his plans for a government veto over the law courts made public after a leak of his letter to the new Home Secretary, John Reid. In it he instructs: ‘We will need to look again at whether primary legislation is needed to address...
Two British soldiers from the 2nd Battalion Royal Anglian Regiment were killed near Basra, southern Iraq on Saturday night, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) announced yesterday. A third soldier was wounded after a roadside bomb exploded just outside the main southern Iraqi city. The MoD said he was in a...
UK Prime Minister Blair yesterday attacked the Bolivian and Venezuelan presidents over their moves to end the foreign exploitation of their countries’ gas and oil resources. Blair made his attack on Bolivia’s Evo Morales and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez at the EU-Latin America trade summit in Vienna. The summit was...
US interest rates have now been increased to five per cent, with last Wednesday’s 16th monthly increase in a row. In fact, the new chief of the Federal Reserve, Bernanke, promised there was more to come, saying ‘some further policy firming may yet be needed to address inflation risks’. The immediate...
Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust yesterday announced plans to axe 430 jobs as part of a cost-cutting plan aimed at saving £84m in the next three years. A Royal College of Nursing spokeswoman blamed the government. She said: ‘This is not about mismanagement or staff not working hard enough, it’s...
NURSES and other National Health Service workers called for national strike action from all unions to defend the NHS last Thursday. RCN and UNISON health workers lobbied parliament and held separate meetings in Westminster on Thursday afternoon, but the message was the same from both unions – ‘Action now to...
‘Keep nurses working – keep patients safe,’ Royal College of Nursing General Secretary Beverley Malone told 1,000 cheering nurses at Westminster Central Hall yesterday. ‘As people on the front line you know the crisis we are facing’ she continued, ‘students can’t get jobs, wards are being closed and services are...
LAST May, MG Rover was closed without a struggle. Last month the closure of Peugeot was announced and this week we have been told that 1,000 workers will be sacked at GM’s Vauxhall Ellesmere Port, a move that obviously prepares the closure of the plant. Soon, there will be no...
The UK’s midwifery service is facing crisis point, the General Secretary of the Royal College of Midwives warned the Blair government on Wednesday. ‘With midwifery jobs being cut, training budgets slashed and midwifery-led care under threat, there is much for our profession to contemplate and act upon,’ was the message...
IN his ‘Address to the Nation’ last Wednesday, the Russian leader, President Vladimir Putin, was forced to deal with the fact that Nato is being expanded up to and around the borders of Russia, from the Baltic Sea to the Caspian Sea, from northern Europe to Central Asia. At the...
THE government is cutting more than £1bn from NHS hospitals. All over the country, trusts are cutting staff, beds, operating theatres and services. The result is that capacity in NHS hospitals is being drastically reduced. At the same time the government is increasing capacity in the corporate private sector. £6.6bn of...
University of Strathclyde Association of University Teachers (AUT) representative David Blieman yesterday described as ‘provocative’ a threat to dock lecturers’ pay if they don’t set exam papers in the continuing national dispute over pay. AUT general secretary, Sally Hunt, added: ‘The majority of universities recognise that bullying tactics like withholding...
The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) yesterday slammed as ‘madness’ the destruction of nurses training places. The RCN was responding to a survey by the Nursing Standard trade magazine which found that one in ten nurses training places are being cut this year. Half the strategic health authorities in England which...
THE foreign ministers of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, plus Germany and Xavier Solana the EU’s ‘Foreign Minister’, met on Monday night but were unable to reach agreement on an Anglo-French resolution opposing Iran’s production of nuclear fuel. While not mentioning sanctions or a military attack,...
TENS of thousands of rail workers in dozens of infrastructure and operating companies are to be balloted for strike action. This is after employers failed to agree unconditionally to a four-point formula to avert a pensions crisis in the industry, the rail unions announced yesterday. ‘The industry now faces the...
‘MY demonstration continues,’ said Brian Haw on Monday, after three Court of Appeal judges ruled in favour of the government and the chief of the Metropolitan Police against his five-year-long peace vigil opposite parliament. Holding up a picture of a baby with horrific deformities, taken by a doctor in Afghanistan,...
SATURDAY’S engagement in Basra was a serious one for British imperialism. One Lynx helicopter was lost, shot down by a Strella missile and five British troops were killed, including the highest ranking British officer to be killed in Iraq since the invasion in March 18 2003. There were also clashes around...
HERTFORDSHIRE fire crews have given seven day’s notice of two eight hour blocks of industrial action on 15 and 20 May. They said late proposals from the fire authority were too little, too late and a vain attempt to gloss over cuts to frontline fire services. The fire authority has been...
Chancellor Gordon Brown yesterday refused to call for prime minister Blair to set a date for his departure. Brown expressed his fears about the situation, telling the Sunday AM programme that ‘when the Labour Party divides and extremists take over, and the moderates lose control, that is a recipe for...
CHANCELLOR Gordon Brown yesterday did his best to hand back the political initiative to his politically battered and discredited Prime Minister Tony Blair. On the one hand, Brown called for a renewal of the Labour Party and its policies while on the other, he refused to demand that...
AHEAD of officially assuming his post on Sunday, Israel’s incoming ‘Defence’ Minister Amir Peretz was anxious to carry on the mission of his predecessor, Shaul Mofaz. He gave the go-ahead to a new Israeli extra-judicial killing, which missed its target and instead killed five Palestinians, including four of the same...
One of the most senior figures in government, an unwilling Charles Clarke was yesterday sacked as home secretary in the biggest cabinet reshuffle of prime minister Blair’s terms of office since 1997. Clarke refused offers of other Cabinet posts, deciding instead to return to the backbenches. In a statement, Clarke...
GATE Gourmet locked-out workers picketed the Hillingdon Regional Office of the Transport and General Workers Union yesterday. They told fellow union members that their employment tribunals for unfair dismissal were starting soon and that they were demanding that the union reinstate their hardship payments. Parmjeet Sidhu told News Line: ‘Tony Woodley...
IT WAS all change yesterday in the Blair cabinet and no change at all at the same time, as leading cabinet members were sacked while the policies of the cabinet remained exactly the same. This contradiction is the product of a situation where the policies of the Blair...
The GMB trade union shop stewards at a meeting yesterday in Manchester voted unanimously to ballot for a national strike in Asda Wal-Mart. The GMB is determined to secure collective bargaining at the 20 distribution depots and to secure payment of the 2005 bonus and safe work rates. GMB members to...
THIS year there is great interest in the 80th anniversary of the general strike of 1926. It is not hard to work out why. In 1926 British imperial power was weakening. The capitalists were desperate to reorganise their industries at home starting with the mining...
PALESTINIAN government spokesman Ghazi Hamad has insisted that his government is not just a Hamas government but is the government of the entire Palestinian people. He said in an interview yesterday: ‘First of all, we must express our reservations over the expression “Hamas government”. This government is the government of...
THE Octagon private sector consortium has been branded the ‘unacceptable face of capitalism’ by a House of Commons committee. MPs on the public accounts committee say Octagon used a refinancing deal of the Norfolk and Norwich PFI (Private Finance Initiative) hospital project to boost the investors’ return by a...
ON May 15th, Nakba Day, Palestinians commemorate their forced displacement and dispossession resulting from the establishment of the state of Israel. By marking the Nakba Day the Palestinian people protest the dispossession of their land and the dispersion of their people in the Diaspora as a result of paving the...
‘We’ve had just as strong support today as we had for the first day of the strike,’ a Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) spokesman told News Line yesterday. Over 800,000 PCS members were out for the second day at Jobcentres, benefit offices, pension centres and the Child Support Agency...
Relatives and widows of the thousands of men who died from asbestos-related cancer, yesterday expressed their determination to fight on after the Law Lords ruled they should not receive full compensation, denying the bereaved who have claims worth millions of pounds. In response to test case appeals by employers...
Yesterday’s strike by benefits and pensions staff was a ‘fantastic success’ said the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS). Jobcentres, benefit offices, pension centres and the Child Support Agency (CSA) were closed across the country yesterday as 80,000 PCS members went on strike on the first day of a two...
BOLIVIA’S President Morales has gone from having a conference last week in Havana with Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, which established a trade group free from US capitalist domination, to yesterday issuing a decree imposing state control on Bolivian gas and oil fields. Bolivia has the...
OVER 12,000 trade unionists and numbers of youth joined the TUC May Day demonstration through central London on Monday, at which locked-out Gate Gourmet workers angrily confronted the leader of their union, TGWU General Secretary Tony Woodley. Woodley was at the front of the demonstration along with Amicus leader Derek...
MAY DAY saw thousands of workers, among them Peugeot motor car workers, hospital workers facing the threat of redundancy, locked out Gate Gourmet workers, and workers fighting to retain their final salary pensions on the march through London from Clerkenwell Green to Trafalgar Square. They were angry at the employers,...