Monthly Archives: June 2006
IN HIS speech to the GMB conference in Blackpool yesterday, the union’s general secretary Paul Kenny featured the union’s current dispute with Asda. He said: ‘They had a battle plan for what would happen for those odd nutcases who might hang on to their trade union membership. Refuseniks they called...
THE question and answer session with Prime Minister Blair at the GMB conference yesterday just illustrated the unbridgeable gulf between him and the working class, a gulf that was evident to both sides. Rowena Howard of South-Western Region asked: ‘Why do you undermine local democracy – selling off schools, selling...
THE two brothers released without charge after the massive state terror operation in Forest Gate told a press conference yesterday how they thought they were being attacked by armed robbers. They said they are hard-working young men who abhor violence and that the raid by around 300 police on their...
YESTERDAY’s press conference heard how a 250 strong police raid, in the early hours of the morning, in Forest Gate led to a completely innocent family being terrorised, assaulted, handcuffed and beaten, with one family member shot in the chest, and luckily avoiding a fatal wound. This was the armed...
THE capitalist state establishment was yesterday rushing into the breach to prop up the ailing head of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Ian Blair, Britain’s leading political policeman. Just a few months ago he was leading the law and order campaign for the Prime Minister, campaigning for a parliamentary bill that...
PRIME Minister Blair shook hands with Israeli leader Ehud Olmert at Downing Street yesterday, saying that there were the strongest links between Britain and Israel and expressing his condolences for those that had died in a train crash near Netanya. However, for the Palestinian children who died on the Gaza...
THE Iranian president Mahmud Ahmadinezhad has said that Iran wishes to have talks with the West on a whole range of issues. He was speaking to a mass meeting in Qazvin province where workers have been demonstrating against privatisation and unemployment. He said: ‘We call for the elimination of all weapons...
ISRAEL faced widespread international condemnation over the killing of eight Palestinian civilians on Friday, including three children while they picnicked on a Gaza beach. Even the United States, Israel’s staunchest ally, was shamed into voicing ‘its regret for the killing and wounding of innocent Palestinians’. However, there was no expression...
HAMAS has issued a statement saying that the Gaza beach massacre, when an Israeli gunboat shelled a Gaza beach murdering 15 mainly women and children last Friday, leaves all options open to the Hamas movement, which has ended its truce. The statement published last Saturday says: ‘Once again the...
,?her innocent family should be forced to go through the same nightmare we went through,’ said Humeya Kalam, the sister of brothers Abdul Kahar and Abul Koyair, yesterday She was addressing several hundred demonstrators outside New Scotland Yard. Protesters from a coalition of Muslim and anti-war organisations were holding a ‘rally...
TEXAS PACIFIC and its Gate Gourmet protege are not renowned for making apologies. In fact the opposite is the case. They are renowned for being no-holds-barred super-exploiters of the working class. But apologise is what they have done to a number of the locked-out Gate Gourmet workers who are...
Hundreds of youth and workers demonstrated outside Forest Gate police station denouncing the capitalist state and declaring that ‘Tony Blair is the terrorist!’ They were corralled and penned in a side road opposite by police who also made a defensive line around the police station, one hundred yards away...
Cardiff University and College Union (UCU) lecturers branch has called on national union leaders to resign over calling off industrial action before consulting members over the latest national pay offer. On Tuesday, at talks with employers brokered by TUC general secretary Brendan Barber, UCU leaders suspended an exams boycott after...
US President George W Bush has welcomed Iran’s initial reaction to a proposal from the EU states designed to achieve a deal with Iran over its nuclear programme and US policy in the Middle East. During a trip to Tehran the European Union’s foreign policy chief laid out the...
ONE-HUNDRED-AND-FIFTEEN trade unionists were murdered for defending workers’ rights in 2005, while more than 1,600 were subjected to violent assaults and some 9,000 arrested, according to the ICFTU’s Annual Survey of Trade Union Rights violations. The survey, published this week, also revealed that nearly 10,000 workers were sacked for their...
The British Medical Association consultants conference yesterday voted overwhelmingly to ‘mount the strongest defence of integrated District General Hospitals’. In his keynote speech to the conference, retiring chairman of the BMA consultants committee, Paul Miller said: ‘I believe passionately in the NHS. ‘Relieving patients of the burden of having to pay...
WHILE Blair continues to try and claim that there has been some partial victory for ‘democracy’ in Iraq, worth the ‘price’ of the many thousands of Iraqis who have died during the occupation of the country at the hands of US-UK forces, the situation on the ground screams out...
The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) on Tuesday submitted its evidence, highlighting the impact on patient services of Trust actions to manage their budgets, to the House of Commons Health Select Committee looking at NHS deficits. The RCN evidence estimates that fifteen-thousand jobs are earmarked to be axed in the...
The leader of the UK’s hospital consultants will today call for a halt to the government’s health privatisation policies that have ‘failed to improve patient care and cost the NHS billions’. Dr Paul Miller, chairman of the British Medical Association (BMA) consultants committee, says the government is wasting NHS money...
BLAIR and Brown stepped up the new Labour assault on the public sector yesterday. Brown even had the cheek to blame service sector workers’ pay for the rise of inflation in the capitalist world! He told a conference of academics and business leaders that ‘The challenge of value for money...
DISTRICT General Hospitals are being destroyed. Bruised and battered from every direction with reforms, £900m direct cuts are the knock out blow with which to finish off the District General Hospitals (DGHs). Without beds, staff, theatres and Accident and Emergency departments (A/Es), DGHs do not have the capacity to provide services,...
GATE Gourmet locked out workers lobbied the General Council of the TGWU yesterday morning. They called on their union leadership to reinstate their hardship payments, and make their dispute official. They also invited general council members to attend their first anniversary rally in Southall on August 20th. Graham Morgan, Region 6 Food...
YESTERDAY Chancellor Gordon Brown joined hands with two of the leaders of the capitalist class to signal his willingness to raise the £3,000 cap on tuition fees in 2009, even before the £3,000 tuition fee comes in this autumn. At the same time as he was showing how willing he...
WHILE British troops are sheltering in their heavily protected barracks, the puppet army and police forces that they have trained in Basra are running amok killing people in sectarian attacks on mosques and people’s homes. Basra Deputy Governor Aminah Ghadban said on Sunday that the Saturday night reactions to the...
THE government’s privatisation drive is threatening the development of a new generation of NHS surgeons. This was revealed yesterday by Britain’s top surgeon, President of the Royal College of Surgeons, Bernard Ribeiro, who warned that deficits mean NHS hospital trusts cannot afford to employ surgeons who have passed their consultant...
The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) issued an update yesterday on its investigation into the Forest Gate police shooting of 23-year-old Abdul Kahar. The IPCC said that forensic work inside the house at 46 Lansdown Road has been completed and the weapon that fired the shot ‘is also...
IN the early hours of Friday morning a police raiding party of up to 250 officers broke into a home in Lansdown Road, Forest Gate, East London after breaking a window, allegedly looking for a chemical weapon. A policeman shot one of the residents, 23-year-old postman, Abdul Kahar, in the...
ABDUL Kahar was shot without warning by police, not his brother, during last Friday’s 4am raid on his home in Forest Gate, east London, his solicitor insisted yesterday. Solicitor Kate Roxburgh said press allegations that the 23-year-old was shot by his younger brother were ‘absolute nonsense, there’s no truth in...
PALESTINIAN president Mahmoud Abbas has the authority, and the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) has completed ‘administrative preparations’ for holding a referendum on a two-state solution of the conflict with Israel, despite Hamas’ opposition, member of the PLO Executive Committee, Yasser Abed Rabbo, announced on Wednesday. The President is determined to...
GATE Gourmet locked-out workers cornered their TGWU ex-convenor Dhillon when he came out of the TGWU Regional Office in Hillingdon yesterday midday, where they held their weekly picket. Rajany Sharma told News Line: ‘We asked him why he was telling us and everyone else to sign the Compromise...
‘They shot an unarmed man who was trying to protect his family at four o-clock in the morning.’ This is how friends of the 23-year-old victim responded to yesterday’s ‘intelligence-led’ police raid on a house in Lansdowne Road, Forest Gate, east London. His friends continued: ‘There were three hundred police officers...
THE Blairite cabinet, faced with the working class rejecting Blair, his war on Iraq, his onslaught on the Welfare State, and with popular revulsion at government sleaze and corruption, has begun to disintegrate. Large numbers of Labour MPs are fearful that they will lose their seats at the next election,...
‘The money’s there, where’s our share!’ was the popular slogan chanted by over 5,000 university lecturers from across Britain marching through central London last Thursday. ‘Pay the lecturers now!’ marchers on the ‘one voice, one demand’ national solidarity demonstration originally called in Newcastle to back Northumbria lecturers who had been...
‘UCEA employers should be sacked for causing disruption in our colleges,’ declared Dennis Hayes, president of the newly formed Universities and Colleges Union, following the merger of AUT and NATFHE, yesterday. He was addressing a pay rally of university lecturers outside the employers’ offices in Tavistock Square, London, at...
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice yesterday said that the US would talk to Iran if it will suspend its nuclear programme. Rice made clear that this was the only way that peace could be maintained in the Gulf. Rice said: ‘The pursuit by the Iranian regime of...
Doctors’ leaders yesterday warned that GP healthcare is in danger of being taken over and monopolised by private companies. Meanwhile, the doctors’ magazine Pulse has said that the Department of Health (DoH) intends to establish 1,280 private practices. The doctors’ leaders were responding to the signing last week of a...
America’s campaign to change supermarket giant Wal-Mart, WakeUpWalMart.com, has released copies of Wal-Mart’s new health care benefits plan for current part-time employees and full-time employees ‘transitioned’ to part-time. The health care documents were given to the group by Wal-Mart employees concerned about the terrible effects that Wal-Mart’s new policies, in...
In 2005, the UK ‘government continued to erode fundamental human rights, the rule of law and the independence of the judiciary, including by persisting with attempts to undermine the ban on torture at home and abroad, and by enacting and seeking to enact legislation inconsistent with domestic and international...
Public sector union UNISON yesterday condemned the government’s extension of Patient Choice as a policy that will lead to the closure of good local hospitals. The Department of Health announced yesterday that 32 more foundation hospitals and fifteen private treatment centres will be added to the list available for patients...
LABOUR Health Minister Burnham yesterday officially launched the extended choice network, a new extended list of hospitals and clinics, that include 15 private treatment centres and 32 Foundation Trusts that NHS patients can choose from when they are referred for treatment by their GP. Burnham said ‘We are putting patients...