Monthly Archives: September 2006
UNISON members working for NHS Logistics will take two 24-hour strikes over the next two weeks to fight the Labour plan to privatise the organisation on October 1st. The first 24-hour strike will run from 10pm on Thursday 21 September at its five depots. There is not the slightest doubt that...
‘We are heading for a serious conflict,’ UNISON head of health Karen Jennings told News Line yesterday. She was referring to statements by the new NHS boss and a Liberal Democrats survey which revealed government plans to axe Accident and Emergency departments in at least ten hospitals around the country. Jennings...
COMMANDER Cressida Dick is to become a deputy assistant commissioner, the Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA) announced on Tuesday. On July 22 2005 Dick was in charge of the ‘tactical delivery’ of an anti-terrorist operation, in the wake of the failed July 21 2005 bombings, under the overall command of Gold...
HEZBOLLAH Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah has criticised the visit of British Premier Tony Blair to Lebanon in a recorded interview broadcast by Al Jazeera TV on 12 September. He also discussed the political make-up and future of Lebanon, strongly criticising the performance of the government and calling for a national...
THE TUC Congress in Brighton yesterday voted unanimously for Composite Motion 16: Palestine, which calls ‘on the British government to maintain all funding to the Palestinian Authority and calls for the restoration of all EU and other international aid to the Palestinian Authority.’ It also calls on the TUC General...
PREMIER Blair got his well deserved come-uppance at the TUC Congress on Tuesday, while the co-author of his policies Gordon Brown was welcomed like a hero at the dinner put on for him by the TUC on Tuesday evening. What major concessions, did the would-be Prime Minister make to have...
‘I THINK we are dealing with a mafia not a police organisation,’ alleged the cousin of murdered Brazilian man Jean Charles de Menezes yesterday. Alex Pereira was reacting to the news that Cressida Dick – the officer in charge of ‘tactical delivery’ of the police operation when Jean Charles was...
SOME 20,00 Greek trade unionists and workers staged a militant demonstration last Saturday in the northern city of Salonica where the Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis was outlining the economic policies of his government. These are the privatisation of the big state industries and services (Greek telecom, gas and...
YESTERDAY Premier Blair could not raise a single clap for his answers to questions about his privatisation drive in the public sector, in the civil service, health and education at the TUC Congress. As for the destruction of trade union rights in the prison service, Blair did not even attempt...
CRIES of ‘TUC, let us in!’ rang out from locked out Gate Gourmet workers and their supporters outside the TUC Conference in Brighton on Monday morning, after TGWU Region One (London) Secretary Steven Hart barred their entry. The locked out workers contrasted their reception to last year, when delegates...
THE British Medical Association (BMA) yesterday condemned the government for spending £171 million on private management consultants, who have been hired to advise NHS Trusts how to make massive cuts. Dr Paul Miller, BMA consultants committee chairman, demanded a halt to the practice. ‘The NHS has become a management consultant...
THE RMT railworkers union delegation demonstrated and walked out in protest at the presence of Tony Blair at the TUC Congress in Brighton yesterday. They were joined in the walkout by other delegates, while other delegations remained inside with their placards opposing Blair’s policies, particularly the UNISON delegation...
YESTERDAY the leadership of the TGWU refused entry, as visitors, to the TUC Congress to some 20 locked out Gate Gourmet workers who have refused to sign the notorious Compromise Agreement. This is the deal that has provided Gate Gourmet with a trade union license to operate a virtual slave...
TRADE unionists from many unions backed the Gate Gourmet locked-out workers’ lobby of the TUC in Brighton yesterday morning. A lobby of over 100 workers and youth, which included many of the locked-out workers, plus nurses from north London and postal workers from west and south London, kept up chants...
UNISON General Secretary Dave Prentis yesterday announced that NHS Logistics staff have voted overwhelmingly to take strike action to defend their service from privatisation. Prentis made the announcement during his speech to move Composite Motion 9 on the NHS at the TUC Congress. Attacking ‘Labour’s market madness in the NHS’, Prentis...
SPEAKING at a press conference in Brighton on the eve of the TUC Congress, TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber said: ‘Today I launch a major new TUC campaign, One-in-Five, to end the exploitation of Britain’s most vulnerable workers. ‘Most people at work today enjoy their jobs. They may have problems...
‘THE government could face a national strike by civil servants in a matter of weeks,’ PCS leader Mark Serwotka told a pre-TUC Congress press briefing yesterday. Serwotka said cuts were hitting benefits, services, minimum wage enforcement and driving tests. ‘The Ministry of Defence faces drastic cuts on an unprecedented scale –...
THE main trade union leaders are determined that the crisis of the Labour government should be kept out of the TUC Congress in Brighton. They try to depict the trade unions as a neutral force as far as the battle for the leadership is concerned. They are simply the people...
THE following emergency resolution was carried unanimously at last year’s TUC Congress. The resolution was the TUC’s response to the Gate Gourmet management’s locking out of over 700 workers on August 10 2005. They were sacked by megaphone in order to bring in a new ‘slave labour’...
ANOTHER British soldier has died after a shooting in the Iraqi town of Al-Qurna, north of Basra. The soldier was the 118th member of the British armed forces to die while serving in Iraq since the conflict began in March 2003. Britain is desperate to withdraw from Iraq. However...
TENANTS on the Aylesbury estate are opposed to privatisation and are demanding improvements to council housing instead of demolition – which is what Southwark Council is proposing for the entire estate, where thousands of people live. In July tenants joined a Young Socialists demonstration through the south London estate...
Living conditions for Palestinians in Gaza are at breaking point, Karen Abuzayd, head of the UN Relief and Works Agency warned yesterday. She said Israeli military action in Gaza over recent weeks has created suffering and mass despair, rather than any desire for political compromise. Abuzayd said that Gaza was...
Following two industrial accidents since July when two workers lost fingers at work, the GMB union is holding a mass meeting of food workers in Wembley today. The GMB has invited its 2,500 members at Katsouris Fresh Foods, Park Royal, to the meeting at 4pm at Brent Indian Association Community...
TONY Blair yesterday took advantage of the refusal of his political rivals, such as his policy co-thinker Gordon Brown and the trade unions, to demand his immediate resignation, when he refused to name the date when he will stand down as PM. Earlier, Brown said that he would support Blair’s...
PRIME Minister Blair yesterday refused to name the date for his departure. Speaking yesterday on a visit to one of the new ‘pathfinder trust’ schools in north London, in the wake of Wednesday’s rash of resignations by a junior minister and seven Blairite aides, he indicated that he...
MARWAN al Barghouthi, the Fatah leader is currently serving a life sentence in an Israeli jail. In an interview with the Lebanese newspaper Al Shira he answered a number of questions about the Palestinian struggle. He was asked: ‘How do you envisage the future working relationship between President...
PRIME Minister Blair and former Blair ultra-loyalists spent yesterday slashing away at each others throats. Blair branded Blairite ex-junior minister, Tom Watson ‘disloyal, discourteous and wrong’ for signing a letter urging him to go. He spoke out as Khalid Mahmood, a parliamentary secretary to Home Office Minister Tony McNulty, along...
The Howard League for Penal Reform revealed on Thursday that local authorities ‘are systematically failing to provide suitable accommodation and support for vulnerable children leaving custody’. It added that this was ‘in breach of their statutory duties, and putting the public in danger of further crime’. Launching its report Chaos, neglect...
GATE Gourmet locked-out workers got good support yesterday as they campaigned for their lobby of the TUC annual conference in Brighton next Monday morning followed by a lunchtime meeting. At Greenford Royal Mail centre CWU area processing rep Geoff Loftus said: ‘It is very disturbing in the 21st century that...
Yesterday a junior defence minister and six parliamentary private secretaries resigned over Prime Minister Blair’s refusal to name a date for his departure. Junior defence minister Tom Watson and the six parliamentary secretaries were among 17 normally loyal Labour MPs who signed a letter stating it is ‘no longer in...
PRIME Minister Blair yesterday revealed his plan to use the same profiling techniques that are being used to identify ‘terrorists’ to identify working class ‘problem families’, whose offspring might develop into ‘menaces of society’. He told his audience: ‘I am saying that where it is clear, as it...
YESTERDAY was a letter writing day for Labour MPs. There were at least three different letters circulating among Labour MPs, including one signed by the majority of the New Labour intake after the 2001 general election urging Blair to resign. The signatures were said to be the pick of the Blairite...
THE chickens are coming home to roost for British imperialism, as the mounting casualty figures in both Afghanistan and Iraq show. It is a long time since a British Chief of the General Staff admitted publicly, as General Sir Richard Dannatt did earlier this week, that the British army in...
In a Labor Day statement last Saturday the US Teamsters Union President Jim Hoffa stressed that workers have to rely on themselves and their unions in the face of the Bush administration’s attack on workers’ rights and living standards. Hoffa said: ‘For those of you fortunate enough to have a...
Two British soldiers were killed and another two injured, one seriously, in a roadside bomb attack near Basra in southern Iraq, yesterday. Their patrol was targeted by a roadside bomb and small arms fire near the town of Ad Dayr, 9km north of Basra, at about 1pm local time. The Ministry...
Private treatment centres are treating as few as a quarter of the National Health Service patients they have been paid to handle. In the worst cases, they have been operating at just 25 per cent and 27 per cent of capacity, figures reveal. Contracts awarded to private health companies worth £1.7...
TEACHERS, hospital workers and other government workers have come out on general strike in the West Bank and Gaza Strip following the non-payment of their wages for the last six months. This non-payment of wages is the direct result of the US and UK governments’ refusal to recognise the Hamas...
‘WE can clamp down on anti-social children before birth’, said Prime Minister Blair on Thursday. That anti-social behaviour is in the genes, is the only conclusion that can be drawn from Prime Minister Blair’s latest reactionary remarks concerning ‘trouble makers,’ whom he says can be identified while they are...
UNIVERSITY students are working more and more – during holidays and during term-time – just to survive, says a joint report just published by the National Union of Students and the TUC. The report, ‘All work and low pay: The growth in UK student employment’, says that the number...
ON THE final day of their three-day strike, the Whipps Cross hospital workers were confident of beating the employer and getting the money they deserve. Nearly 300 porters, cleaners and switchboard staff employed by Rentokil Initial at the East London hospital have held a series of strikes in...
On a special trip to New Orleans on Tuesday, August 29, one year after Hurricane Katrina, Canadian Auto Workers President Buzz Hargrove said Canadian relief efforts must continue to help rebuild the city. All levels of American governments have failed at salvaging the city, said Hargrove. Entire neighbourhoods have been ravaged...
The UN’s humanitarian chief, Jan Egeland, yesterday described Israel’s use of cluster bombs in south Lebanon during the final three days of the conflict there as ‘shocking’ and ‘immoral’. He added: ‘What’s shocking and I would say completely immoral is that 90 per cent of the cluster bomb strikes occurred...
Firefighters, hospital and postal workers were manning picket lines yesterday as the working class stepped up action to defend jobs, wages and conditions. Over 1,100 Merseyside Fire Brigades Union (FBU) members walked out at 10 am to begin eight days of strike action against plans to axe 120 firefighter posts...