Monthly Archives: April 2007
BLAIR in his Callaghan Memorial lecture in Cardiff came out as an admirer of the right wing Labour premier, who he says ‘had neither the luck nor the time, nor, in the 1970s, the Party he needed.’ In fact Callaghan was premier for only three years and was brought down...
UP to sixty trade unionists, patients, local residents and youth demonstrated outside the Maudsley Hospital, south London yesterday, against planned cuts including the closure of the mental health hospital’s emergency clinic. Also under threat is the Felix Post Unit day hospital for elderly patients. The protesters carried placards saying ‘Emergency clinic...
Defence secretary Des Browne yesterday said he takes ‘full responsibility’ for decisions which allowed the fifteen UK sailors and marines held by the Iranians to sell their stories to the media. Speaking for the first time since the row erupted at the weekend, Browne revealed that prime minister Blair...
WHILE the 15 British sailors were being held in comfortable and well fed custody by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, there was another captive, just across the border in Baghdad, who was not so lucky. He was the Iranian envoy to Iraq, Jalal Sharafi who was kidnapped in Baghdad by men...
The purpose of the Maritime Labour Convention (MLC), which comes into operation soon, is to protect seafarers’ rights throughout the world. But as Tony Ayton, who for the past seven years has been the senior International Transport Workers Federation Inspector for the 32 Counties of Ireland, explains, it is flawed. Ayton...
THE government was completely undone yesterday after the Secretary of Defence Des Browne firmly bolted the stable door well after all the military horses had bolted, when he forbade military personnel selling their stories to the media. He had agreed to the practice earlier in a desperate attempt to...
A MASS hunger strike is being waged by inmates in America’s Cuban Guantanamo Bay concentration camp, against being transferred into ‘maddening’ new isolation units. Thirteen detainees are currently reported to be refusing food in protest at being transferred into the new 38 million dollar (£19 million) ‘Camp Six’ unit. America has...
Last year, 2006, the General Conference of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) put together a new International Convention dealing with the issue of seafarers’ rights. In an important two-part article Ireland’s senior International Transport Workers Federation (ITF) inspector Tony Ayton welcomes the new Convention as an important advance in the...
Millions of Iraqis marched in towns and cities across the country against the US-led occupation yesterday, waving the nationalist Iraqi flag on the fourth anniversary of the fall of Baghdad in April 2003. Up to a million men, women and children marched in the southern city of Najaf in response...
YESTERDAY the TGWU leaders produced their statement of full support for the Sainsbury family in the battle to keep out the Texas Pacific-backed raiding party of venture capitalists. The union statement said: ‘The Transport and General Workers Union today backed the Sainsbury family’s hostile position to the private...
The National Union of Teachers (NUT) annual conference in Harrogate voted unanimously on Saturday for a one-day strike against a pay-cutting two per cent limit on public sector pay, and against regional pay. This followed an appeal last Friday from guest speaker civil service union, PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka,...
The Transport and General Workers Union yesterday issued a statement backing ‘the Sainsbury family’s hostile position to the private equity bid for the supermarket chain’. The union also pledged to continue to ‘oppose the bid with every means at its disposal’. The TGWU has 25,000 members in Sainsbury’s employed in retail...
BRITISH military chiefs yesterday once again put their soldiers in the front line, this time to face the world’s media to try to explain away the situation that their chiefs had got them into. After their unconditional freeing by the Iranian president the scripted effort to depict the Iranians as...
At the union’s annual conference in Harrogate today, the National Union of Teachers National Executive will propose an amendment ‘congratulating (area) divisions’, who have campaigned against City Academies. The NUT National Executive amendment 24.2 states: ‘Conference deplores the pressure on local authorities to include Academies within their proposals for Building...
THE death of ten US and UK soldiers in 24 hours in Iraq speaks for itself. The occupation is now even more unpopular than it was in April 2003, after the allied armies reached Baghdad. It is now skating on the thinnest of thin ice. The fact that two out...
WORK and Pensions Minister John Hutton said yesterday that lie detectors will be used to help root out benefit cheats in job centres later this year. Once again the Labour government is setting out to criminalise a big section of the working class. This is for the sole purpose of cutting...
THE AFL-CIO will join with its Korean trade union allies and strongly oppose the just-completed South Korea-UStrade deal (KORUS) because of the damage it will do to working familes, farmers and domestic producers in both countries. Negotiators worked down to the wire to seal the deal before the end...
‘Although Iran has the right to prosecute them by following the model of the Prophet, the fifteen people are pardoned and their freedom given as a gift to the British people,’ Iranian President Ahmadinezhad said yesterday. Coming to the conclusion of a two-hour speech, he added about the detained...
THE decision of the Iranian leadership to unconditionally free the fifteen British sailors and marines, who trespassed into Iranian waters, and also to leave the people of the world to make the judgement on the whole episode, constitutes a great victory for the Iranian revolution and for all the...
US President George W Bush on Tuesday warned that US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Syria sent ‘mixed signals’ that undermined US-led efforts to isolate Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. In his first public remarks on the visit, Bush took a very dim view of US and European diplomats reaching...
the actual number of specialist doctor training posts available in the UK is 18,518 – not between 22,000 and 23,000 as the government had publicly indicated, the British Medical Association reported yesterday. This means that up to 14,000 junior doctors will be left without jobs. BMA analysis of figures on the...
UKRAINIAN President Viktor Yushchenko has mounted a coup attempt in the Ukraine, dissolving parliament and calling a snap general election on May 27th. The parliament dominated by a coalition led by the Prime Minister Yanukovich has refused to be dissolved, and condemned the President’s measures as illegal. Yesterday tens of thousands...
‘The act of claiming asylum is not a criminal offence and should not be treated as such,’ say MPs and peers in a scathing report. In the section ‘detention and removal’, the parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights report on the treatment of asylum seekers states in its conclsions and...
THE 1982 Malvinas (Falklands War) was a decisive event not just for Britain’s Foreign Policy but for its home policy. The islands off the Argentinian coast are obviously Argentinian territory, and had been claimed as such ever since the foundation of the Argentinian state. On the Malvinas islands live a handful...
In their scathing report on the treatment of asylum seekers, including enforced destitution, MPs and peers on the parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights, condemn the British state’s treatment of asylum seeking children. The report’s conclusions and recommendations on the ‘treatment of children’ state: ‘26. As we have made clear in...
This Sunday April 8th will mark the first takeover by a foundation trust hospital of a ‘bankrupt’ NHS hospital. Heart of England NHS Foundation Trust is taking over the nearby Good Hope NHS Trust, both in Birmingham. A feature of the transaction is that £17.5m of Good Hope’s historic deficit has...
‘The government has indeed been practising a deliberate policy of destitution’ of vulnerable asylum seekers, say MPs and peers on the parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights. In its Conclusions and Recommendations, their report says: ‘1. We recommend that in the development of asylum policy the Government should proceed on...
PRESIDENT BUSH has laid the basis for military intervention against Iran with his condemnation of Iran’s ‘inexcusable behaviour’ in arresting the 15 British sailors who trespassed into its territorial waters, and with his demand that the ‘hostages’ be freed at once. Bush brought back into the minds of many of...