Monthly Archives: January 2007
A packed 400-strong Save Chase Farm meeting in Enfield last Saturday heard calls for Councils of Action to organise occupations to stop the closure of Chase Farm and Whipps Cross hospitals. Speaking from the floor at the north London meeting, Bill Rogers, chairman of train drivers’ union ASLEF Chingford branch,...
US Secretary of State Rice’s visit to the Middle East is to organise the conditions for US attacks on both Iran and Syria, actions which Bush believes will be decisive for putting right the disastrous situation of the US forces in Iraq. Bush and Rice do not believe...
After President Bush has informed the world that 20,000 more US troops are to be sent to Iraq, and his Secretary of State, Rice has threatened Iran and Syria with military action if they continue to ‘meddle’ in Iraq, up has popped Prime Minister Blair to argue that Britain’s...
ON THE day marking the fifth anniversary of the first detainees being transported to the US concentration camp at Guantánamo Bay, on the tip of Cuba, more than 500 people demonstrated opposite the United States embassy in London. Speaking from the mass demonstration, Amnesty International’s UK Director Liz Allen, said:...
THE Chief Executive of Enfield, Barnet and Haringey Clinical Strategy Project Board, Ms Johnson, has made it clear the Board intends to press ahead with closing Chase Farm Hospital Accident and Emergency Department, as well as consultant-led maternity and paediatric services. Despite an official ‘consultation process’, Johnson made it clear...
‘WE HAVE one year to save the National Health Service (NHS). An awful lot of Trusts are in a dire financial state.’ This was a warning delivered to journalists yesterday by Mr James Johnson, the Chairman of the British Medical Association (BMA). Speaking on the ‘State of the NHS, he said...
BIG BUSINESS, the stockmarkets and the TUC were shaken yesterday midday when the Bank of England raised its interest rates by a quarter of one per cent to 5.25 per cent. Commenting on the decision, TUC Head of Economics, Adam Lent said: ‘Today's decision smacks of panic rather than considered...
‘This is a damning indictment of a social care system that is failing older people’, Age Concern’s Director General, Gordon Lishman, said on Wednesday. He was responding to the just-published State of Social Care in England 2005/06, a comprehensive annual overview of the entire social care sector, from the Commission...
‘This is a damning indictment of a social care system that is failing older people’, Age Concern’s Director General, Gordon Lishman said yesterday. He was responding to the just-published ‘State of Social Care’ report from the Commission for Social Care Inspection (CSCI). This found that elderly and disabled individuals and families...
THE just-published ‘State of Social Care’ report from the Commission for Social Care Inspection (CSCI) was greeted as ‘a damning indictment of a social care system that is failing older people’, by Age Concern’s Director General, Gordon Lishman yesterday. Free social care for the elderly is a thing of...
‘The current exodus is the largest population movement in the Middle East since Palestinians were displaced following the creation of the State of Israel in 1948,’ the UN High Commission for Refugees has said. In a report released on Monday, along with a 60 million dollar appeal to the International...
Details emerged yesterday of a deal, yet to be agreed by workers, which means the end of final salary pensions at British Airways. The TGWU said yesterday that the BA Forum of four unions (TGWU, BALPA, GMB and Amicus) has ‘collectively agreed to recommend the agreement.’ The GMB told News Line...
THE whole of the area from Afghanistan to the Horn of Africa is now one great killing zone where US-UK imperialism either kills at will or is seeking to do so. For the US upholders of world wide capitalist law and order, borders, national sovereignty and its own slogan of...
WASHINGTON – The Teamsters announced yesterday the union’s legislative agenda for their 110th Congress, targeting key issues for working families, including the Employee Free Choice Act, a minimum wage hike, fair trade and raising economic and work standards on a variety of fronts. ‘The mid-term elections demonstrated that Americans demand...
FOLLOWING instructions from the government’s Cabinet Office to government departments to put their mail out to tender to get the best cutthroat deal, the Department for Work and Pensions has done just that, robbing the Royal Mail of £12 million of business. This is the Department run by the...
TEAMSTERS Local Union 767 Members at Allied Waste Services, Fort Worth, Texas have been on strike since December 18th 2006. They have taken action against the company. Contract negotiations have stalled since Mr Jim Lattimore, Chief Negotiator for Allied Waste, decided that he will not be available because he ...
OVER 100 angry RMT members staged a lobby outside City Hall, Tower Bridge, yesterday, demanding an emergency meeting with London Mayor Ken Livingstone over plans to sack 209 cleaners on the Underground. The union said the private contractors should be sacked, not the cleaners, who should be returned to direct...
WITH Prime Minister Blair organising his post premiership job, Chancellor Brown stepped forward yesterday to promote the latest New Labour ‘vision’ of a ‘patriotic Britain’. Asked was he ‘gearing up’ to be prime minister on the BBC’s Sunday AM progamme, Brown said: ‘I think there’s a job to be done...
University Hospital of North Staffordshire NHS Trust is urging people to avoid using the Accident and Emergency department at weekends because of the pressure on beds. Non-emergency patients are being urged to see their GP, call NHS Direct or use walk-in centres in Burslem and Leek. Trust managers are saying patients...
WITH Blair’s political reputation destroyed by the Iraq war, and the massive resistance to his attack on the Welfare State, and with the media agog at his spending his winter break setting up his post-parliamentary career, the acting Prime Minister Gordon Brown yesterday gave the major political interview of...
AT last President Bush has stammered out a few words about the lynching of President Saddam Hussein, saying that he would have preferred to see his execution conducted in a dignified fashion. In fact the responsibility for the invasion of Iraq, the occupation and destruction of the country, the assassination...
ONE WEEK after the execution of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, Prime Minister Blair has again refused to comment on the lynching. He said yesterday, trying to relegate the Iraq disaster to just another issue, that he would speak about ‘all those other issues’ next week. He added, while on a...
Trade unions and health professionals yesterday slammed as ‘very alarming’ and ‘staggering’, the government’s leaked draft NHS pay and workforce strategy for 2008 to 2011 for England, which predicts 37,000 NHS jobs will be axed this year. The document says that the health service will experience a shortage of...
THE leaking of Department of Health (DoH) documents, including ‘Pay and Workforce Strategy for 2008-11’, reveals the Labour government’s plan to slash NHS wages, by holding pay rises down to below two per cent, with the government’s own inflation figure at 3.9 per cent. The documents recognise that such...
The National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns (NCADC) yesterday highlighted the UN High Commissioner for Refugees’ (UNHCR) latest report for the benefit of Iraqi asylum seekers in the UK who have claims in progress or have been refused asylum. NCADC says ‘UNHCR is specifically advising refugee receiving countries to give due...
YESTERDAY the role model for US-UK imperialism was Pontius Pilate, as the US military and Prime Minister Blair sought to wash their hands of the abuse and bloodletting taking place in Baghdad under their occupation. A US senior officer, Major General Caldwell, at mid-day sought to convince the world...
AMONG the towns and cities where Iraqis have been marching in funeral processions to honour President Saddam Hussein is Al Dujail. This is where the assassination attempt on the president was made in 1982, by the Al Dawa party, which is now the ruling party in the Iraqi puppet government,...
Public sector union, UNISON said yesterday it will ‘strongly resist any attempt to cut nurses’ pay whether by moving to regional pay or by using the threat of unemployment’. Responding to the NHS Pay and Workforce Strategy plans, leaked to the Health Services Journal, UNISON deputy head of health, Mike...
Saddam’s deputy, Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri, issued a statement on 1 January, mourning his ‘brother’ and calling for unity. ‘The criminal evil hands of the US administration, its British allies, the Zionists and the Persian safawis (Shi’ites) assassinated one of the nation’s historic and great leaders; a defiant brave knight...
Youth unemployment is now higher than it was in 1997, with 702,000 young people aged 16-24 jobless, according to official figures released just before Christmas. This is 37,000 more than it was when Labour took office in 1997. It is a real indictment of the anti-working class policies of the...
‘Medical education is under attack on several fronts,’ warns Professor Michael Rees, chair of the British Medical Association’s (BMA’s) Medical Academics Committee. In a BMA response to the Education and Skills Committee inquiry, published today, Rees says: ‘Teaching posts are being cut and university funding mechanisms mean medical schools are...
The GMB trade union says companies who kill employees will face private prosecutions if the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) ‘continues to fail workers’. The High Court has ordered that the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) must reconsider its decision not to prosecute North-Eastern Roofing, the employer of teenager Daniel Dennis, who...
Hundreds of angry supporters of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, many of them armed, protested yesterday against his execution and blamed leading Iraqi politicians for carrying it out. ‘Coward Moqtada, Traitor Hakim,’ chanted men, women and children, slamming Shi’ite radical leader Moqtada al-Sadr and former Iran-based leader Abdel Aziz al-Hakim for...
SADDAM HUSSEIN went to his death bravely and heroically, executed by agents of imperialism – the leaders of a puppet government that came to ‘power’ after returning to Iraq in the baggage trains of the imperialist armies of occupation. The execution was a mark of the desperation of the puppets...
FOUR YEARS after the first Tube assets were handed to the private sector, London Underground’s biggest union has called for the disastrous ‘Public-Private Partnership’ to be scrapped if the capital is to have a world-class metro system by 2012. On the fourth anniversary of the PPP, an RMT study ...