Monthly Archives: July 2006
THE bravery and determination of the Palestinian and Lebanese people in standing fast against the Israeli military murder machine has thrown not just the Zionist regime but also their imperialist sponsors into a crisis. The Palestinian masses have refused to take action to overthrow the just-elected Hamas government,...
‘It’s true we have had people who got themselves into difficulty and ministers been dismissed. We’ve had huge problems on this front,’ Prime Minister Blair admitted yesterday. He was responding to a question on the BBC Politics show, from the fringes of the G8 summit in Leningrad. Presenter Jon Sopel had...
GATE Gourmet locked out workers got great support from trade unionists at the Tolpuddle Martyrs anniversary march and festival in Dorset yesterday. Over eight thousand trade unionists marched with the agricultural workers unions’ leading. They were followed by the Gate Gourmet locked out workers and their banner, and trade union delegations...
‘THE Tolpuddle Martyrs were called troublemakers and were transported to Australia. ‘We were called troublemakers and sacked,’ Parmjeet Sidhu said at the Gate Gourmet locked-out workers’ weekly picket of the Transport and General Workers Union regional office, in Hillingdon, near Heathrow Airport yesterday. Parmjeet told News Line that a delegation of...
Southport and Ormskirk UNISON health branch has launched a campaign with other health unions, Amicus, GMB, TGWU, the RCN and RCM against 33 compulsory redundancies at the two northwest England hospitals, with more to follow. The campaign will kick off with a day of protest outside Southport Hospital on Monday...
CHANCELLOR Gordon Brown told the House of Commons last Thursday that he will reduce the Whitehall budget by up to 20 per cent in real terms over the next five years. There is only one way that this can be done – through big cuts in jobs and...
‘OCCUPATION is a crime! Free Iraq and Palestine!’ shouted more than 400 people gathered in Whitehall opposite the gates to Downing Street on Wednesday evening. ‘Olmert – terrorist! Tony Blair – terrorist! George Bush – terrorist!’ they continued shouting, as well as ‘From the River to the Sea – Palestine...
THE arrest and questioning of Lord Levy, the man who got millions in donations for Labour’s election campaigns, and the fact that the trail leads directly to his boss, the Prime Minister, who is on record as saying that the buck stops with him as far as...
Israel yesterday threatened to target Lebanese airports, other than Beirut’s international airport, and attack areas of Beirut where Hezbollah leaders live and where it alleges long-range rockets are stored. Hezbollah replied that if such attacks took place its forces will launch attacks on major Israeli cities. This new threat to the...
Lord Levy, Prime Minister Blair’s chief fundraiser and close political ally was questioned for a second time yesterday by police investigating the ‘cash for honours’ scandal. Metropolitan Police Deputy Assistant Commissioner John Yates said the investigation is ‘very serious’ and ‘integral’ to his inquiries and that he will pursue...
A BLOC of twelve trade unions have joined together to campaign against the Labour government’s health service ‘reforms’, that is the Brown-Blair programme for privatising the NHS. The campaign includes both TUC trade unions such as the TGWU, Amicus, UNISON and the GMB, and non-TUC professional trade unions such as...
32-year-old computer operator Babar Ahmad’s appeal against extradition to the USA began at the High Court in London on Tuesday and is due to end on Friday. Family, friends and supporters rallied outside the court at the beginning of the hearing. Babar’s father Ashfaq Ahmad told them: ‘If Babar is extradited...
A BLOC of twelve trade unions have joined together to campaign against the Labour government’s health service ‘reforms’, that is the Brown-Blair programme for privatising the NHS. The campaign includes both TUC trade unions such as the TGWU, Amicus, UNISON and the GMB, and non-TUC professional trade unions such as...
ISRAELI prime minister Ehud Olmert yesterday called the capture of two Israeli soldiers on the Lebanese border by Hezbollah an ‘act of war’. Olmert threatened to mount a military invasion of Lebanon in retaliation and Israeli planes began a series of bombing raids into the country. Hezbollah, the Lebanese resistance movement...
ISRAELI prime minister Ehud Olmert yesterday called the capture of two Israeli soldiers on the Lebanese border by Hezbollah an ‘act of war’. Olmert threatened to mount a military invasion of Lebanon in retaliation and Israeli planes began a series of bombing raids into the country. Hezbollah, the Lebanese resistance movement...
‘This despicable government wants to take Multiple Sclerosis nurses away,’ wheelchair-bound retiree George Goodger told News Line yesterday after handing in a petition to Downing Street. George and a group from the patient-led MS Nurses Campaign handed in a 2,000 signature ‘guestbook’ of appeals against cuts obtained from their website. He...
‘FREE Babar Ahmad,’ Babar’s father Ashfaq Ahmad told supporters outside the High Court in central London yesterday, ‘if Babar is extradited to America then a lot more people will face the same treatment.’ Mr Ahmad was speaking to a crowd of over 100 family, friends and supporters of his son,...
British capitalism is today facing a massive energy crisis, largely of its own making. It was after all, Thatcher and Heseltine who shut down the mining industry to get rid of the NUM, and announced that Britain could rely on the global economy for cheap energy. Thatcher’s vision of Britain...
ACROSS the US, thousands of workers marched to Labour Board Offices and Worksites, demanding Freedom to have a Trade Union, on Monday July 10. Workers said that the upcoming ‘Kentucky River’ decisions from the Bush Labour Board could strip away their protections through trade unions. In a week of actions...
THE Israeli Cabinet, after its weekly meeting on Sunday, issued a statement that it was greatly encouraged by the ‘low-key’ international response to its invasion of Gaza and the destruction of its infrastructure. It said that this low key international response, which in fact is a conspiracy of silence, allowed...
The crew of an Australian tanker docked in Hobart could face fines under the Howard government’s Industrial Relations laws for protesting against the operator’s decision to replace the Australian crew with foreign seafarers by refusing to unload the ship’s cargo of sulphuric acid, says the Australian Congress of Trade...
The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) announced yesterday it is to conduct a second inquiry into last month’s armed police raid in Forest Gate. The IPCC confirmed it will investigate claims by neighbours of the main raided house that they were assaulted after police broke into 48 Lansdown Road. One man...
LAST month, Prime Minister Blair announced that John Prescott would not be resigning as Deputy Prime Minister, and that, in fact, he would go at the same time as he, Blair, left 10 Downing Street. This seemed to give Prescott an extra year of office. But this was before the...
‘We don’t want other families to go through this long and drawn out process with no possible outcome,’ Susan Alexander, the mother of Azelle Rodney, told News Line last Thursday. She was speaking after receiving the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) decision last Tuesday not to prosecute any of the police...
MORE Gate Gourmet locked-out workers went to the Hillingdon Transport and General Workers Union Region One office yesterday to register their claim for February’s hardship payments. They are very angry at having to register at all, and are demanding that the union brings their hardship payments up to date and...
YESTERDAY the US barred the way in the United Nations Security Council to a resolution condemning the Israeli assault on Gaza, calling for all Israeli troops to be withdrawn and for all of the Hamas government officials that have been arrested by the Zionist military to be freed. The US...
IGNORING international outcries for restraint and diplomacy, the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) overnight Thursday reoccupied a belt of the northern Gaza Strip, called it a buffer zone, including the sites of three former Jewish colonial settlements, amid Palestinian, Arab and Islamic diplomatic efforts to stop the Israeli invasion. President Mahmud...
THE British government’s Defence Secretary, Des Browne, said yesterday that he would be making a statement to the House of Commons as soon as possible, and that the possibility of sending more troops to Afghanistan is being considered as a ‘matter of urgency’. In fact, the request for more combat...
THE British Medical Association’s Annual Representative Meeting (BMA’s ARM), June 2006 turned into a struggle between the leadership, which supports the government’s privatisation reforms, and the representatives who were opposed to them. On the one side were martialed all the evasive arguments and double-meaning double-talk of the BMA hierarchy plus...
PARLIAMENTARY Commissioner Sir Philip Mawer yesterday announced a full investigation into Deputy Premier Prescott’s relations with US tycoon Phillip Anschutz, focusing on his stay at Anschutz’s Colorado ranch in July 2005. Prescott had said earlier that he would not give up his government office. Mawer intends to report to MPs...
Britain is considering sending more troops to Afghanistan ‘as a matter of urgency’ Defence Secretary Des Browne told MPs yesterday. In a statement to the House of Commons he said: ‘I can now confirm that I have today received advice on additional deployment and I am considering it, as a...
YESTERDAY the British Foreign Secretary, Margaret Beckett, condemned North Korea’s testing of an intercontinental missile that when developed will have the capacity to deliver a nuclear bomb to the western seacoast of the United States. Hers is the usual ruling class standard position at work, since Beckett’s government stands for...
UNISON yesterday backed ‘extremely angry’ members at New Cross Hospital, Wolverhampton, who have voted in a consultative ballot for strike action in defence of jobs. When asked by News Line ‘will UNISON support a strike,’ a spokeswoman said: ‘Of course we will’. She added that General Secretary Dave Prentis stands by...
The GMB trade union yesterday revealed its fears that many more ex-Southwark council school caretakers could face the same frightening threats of eviction as Steve Barrett. As long ago as April, the long-serving school caretaker of Galleywall School Bermondsey received a ‘notice to quit’ his family home of 25 years...
‘stray cliques brought in by the occupation’ are assassinating Iraq’s scientists and intellectuals, Dr KhUdayir al-Murshidi, professor at the Faculty of Medicine at Baghdad University alleged last week. The topic of discussion in a 50 minute programme on Dubai’s Al-Arabiya Television on 30 June was the targeted killing of Iraqi...
USING the release of the Israeli Corporal Gilad Shalit as pretext, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert unleashed his occupation forces to reoccupy the Gaza Strip. The job given to the occupation forces was to terrorize Palestinian civilians with sonic booms, thin them to starvation, disrupt traffic, electricity supply, and...
The National Union of Students (NUS) commented on figures released by the Higher Education Statistics Agency yesterday which show the average graduate salary to be £19,000. NUS President Gemma Tumelty said: ‘Students entering university in 2005 are estimated to owe £20,000 when they finish their degree, which is before top-up...
Prime Minister Blair has once again refused to apologise for the police raid and shooting of an innocent man in Forest Gate, as he addressed the MPs on the House of Commons Liaison Committee of parliamentary chairmen yesterday. Home Affairs Committee chairman John Denham put it to him: ‘it’s difficult...
The Labour government is absolutely determined to impress its big business backers and show them that it is ready to take action against ‘slackers’ and ‘terrorist suspects’ and their families – for the benefit of the country of course. The Treasury’s Economic Secretary, Ed Balls, has just announced that relatives...
THE former Labour Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, yesterday continued with his campaign to restore his alleged political reputation. He says that this was destroyed when Prime Minister Blair made him the scapegoat for the fiasco of the Labour government’s law and order policies. He admitted that ‘public confidence’ in...
DEFENCE Minister Watson was forced to make a statement in answer to an urgent question in the House of Commons yesterday afternoon, after the bourgeois media had expressed the fears of the military that British troops in Afghanistan had bitten off more than they could chew. Watson said: ‘Yes, our...