Monthly Archives: July 2007
ON the eve of the Bank of England’s monthly Monetary Policy Committee meeting over the Bank’s interest rate, the British Chambers of Commerce has issued a dire warning to the Bank – that it must not raise its interest rate further from its current level of 5.75 per cent,...
THE trade unions must take joint action with the postal workers to defend their members’ jobs and basic rights. They must go forward to bring down the Brown government, replacing it with a workers government that will expropriate the bosses – a News Line-All Trades Union Alliance rally in central...
Postal workers at Mail Centres across the UK are taking 24-hour strike action from 3am this morning in the second week of rolling strikes called by the Communication Workers Union over pay, conditions and job cuts. And CWU Counters Staff will be out from 2.30pm to 6.30pm over plans...
HALF WAY through the CWU’s two weeks of rolling strike action it is perfectly clear that well over 90 per cent of the CWU’s members are not only supporting the action enthusiastically, but are demanding that the action be stepped up to win the struggle. The CWU executive will be...
PALESTINIAN Prime Minister, Hamas leader Ismail Haniya met a delegation from the Euro-Med Human Rights Committee at his office in Gaza last Saturday. Haniya spoke about the January 2000 elections and the sweeping victory for Hamas that allowed it to form the government, noting that Israel imposed an...
All the public sector trade unions must unite for action to bring down the Brown government and replace it with a workers government and socialism. That was the message from All Trades Unions Alliance national secretary Dave Wiltshire to a hundred trade unionists and youth at a News Line/ATUA rally...
Yesterday workers at Royal Mail’s Heathrow Airport Worldwide Distribution Centre at Langley came out on 24-hour strike at noon, as part of the Communication Workers Union campaign of rolling action. The union is fighting against a wage-cutting pay settlement and attempts by Royal Mail management to smash up their conditions,...
IN London yesterday, the FTSE 100 rebounded momentarily, but then fell back into the red, down by 48.5 points by 1pm after a 200 points plus fall knocked 3.2 per cent, that is £40 billion, off share prices on Thursday. On Thursday night the circuit breakers came into effect...
ONE hundred angry RMT rail workers on London Underground lobbied Downing Street yesterday, demanding that tube maintenance work done by the collapsed Metronet private contract is taken back ‘in-house’. They were joined by some civil servants from the PCS trade union who came to show their solidarity. Paul O’Brien, an RMT...
GORDON Brown is now infamous as the friend of the equity capitalists who, thanks to him, pay no taxes, while he insists that the wages of low paid workers must be kept down ‘in line with the struggle against inflation’. He is also infamous for his diktat that the employers...
Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah has revealed how his Hezbollah movement prevailed in last year’s Israeli war on Lebanon. He said: ‘We had believed that war would break out, that the Zionists would launch a war against Lebanon because of their defeat in 2000 in order to restore their...
THE CWU is warning that 40,000 jobs will go as a result of increased mechanisation of the Royal Mail system. It is also objecting to a 2.5 per cent pay offer, which is in fact a 2.4 per cent wage cut with inflation running at 4.9 per cent. On...
WITHIN its 1700 gmt newscast on 24 July, at the end of the day’s talks between the US and Iranian governments in Baghdad, Al-Iraqiyah Television reported the following developments which emphasised the crisis of the US puppet Maliki regime. It quoted an ‘authorised source’ at the Office of the Prime...
Postal workers yesterday responded angrily to Gordon Brown’s insistence at prime minister’s questions, on the eve of their 24-hour rolling strikes, that ‘pay settlements must tackle inflation’. Brown refused to intervene at the request of Islington South Labour MP Emily Thornberry, on behalf of postal worker constituents, to get Royal...
Prime Minister Brown yesterday announced his ‘four options’ for extending the period that police can hold ‘terror suspects’ without charging them. He is ‘considering’ extending the present limit on holding suspects without charge from 28 days to 56 days as well as allowing phone-tap evidence if parliament will agree...
THE UK authorities issued National Insurance numbers to 713,000 overseas workers in the year to April 2007. The WRP and the News Line are pleased to welcome all these workers to Britain. We urge them all to join the trade unions, so that they do not condemn themselves...
ROYAL Mail workers are resuming their strike action tonight, furious at leaked Post Office plans to smash up their pensions. The massive Mail Centres employing thousands of CWU members come out on 24-hour strike at 7pm this evening, other sections come out tomorrow and during the day on Friday, then...
Al-QAEDA founder Osama bin Laden is alive and sheltering in ‘lawless parts of Pakistan’ on the border with Afghanistan, according to US Director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell. With this allegation, McConnell was setting the scene for a US threat that it will take military action against the Taleban and...
THE official spokesperson of the Fatah-affiliated Martyr Abu Ammar Brigades, Abu Muhammad, has affirmed the brigades’ loyalty to political leaders and Fatah decisions, but announced that the group refuses to hand over its weapons or renounce violence against Israel. The announcement follows the declaration of the main military wing...
POSTAL workers in Oxford who have been on unofficial strike for a week, yesterday returned to work. People are still very angry and a sizeable proportion of members wanted to stay out. A mass meeting on Sunday morning at the Cowley Workers Club voted three to one to return. Workers took the...
THE floods crisis in central and western England continued yesterday with tens of thousands of homes stranded without water and electricity supplies. Up to 350,000 people in Gloucestershire faced being left without water as the River Severn threatened to overflow. Residents were told the situation could last several days...
WE all saw the Katrina disaster, and what it did to New Orleans, destroying whole areas of the city and making them uninhabitable to this day. Responsible for the disaster was the combination of Bush’s privatisation policies, where he handed essential services over to voluntary organisations and charities, while his...
THE Palestinian Information Centre, the website of Hamas, last Friday posted a statement by Hamas denouncing PNA President Mahmud Abbas’s speech before the Palestine Central Council (PCC) in Ramallah on 18 July, where he stated that ‘Hamas is digging its own grave’. It described the speech as...
Three RAF servicemen were killed on Thursday in one of the daily mortar attacks on their base in Basra, southern Iraq, spokesman Major Matthew Bird said yesterday. He added that the incident occurred when the Airport Camp came under several ‘indirect fire’ attacks on Thursday. The UK Ministry of Defence yesterday...
Patient safety and the future career prospects of many thousands of junior doctors could be further jeopardised within the next two weeks, warned the British Medical Association’s new Chairman of Council yesterday. Calling for decisive action by government and trusts, Dr Hamish Meldrum said that the Medical Training and Application...
ALL talk of a Brown ‘electoral bounce’ is sheer drivel or plain self deception after Labour got the votes of just 45 per cent of the 41.57 per cent of the registered voters who turned out at the Sedgefield by-election. Sedgefield was the seat of ex-Prime Minister Blair. ...
HANDS Off Iraqi Oil – the campaign launched to stop the theft of Iraq’s oil reserves – says that mainstream media coverage ‘has uncritically reproduced and popularised a wide range of myths about Iraq’s economic options.’ The campaign adds: ‘An Oil Law giving foreign companies the primary role in developing...
A PACKED public meeting of more than 300 British trade unionists and anti-war campaigners has heard an Iraqi trade union leader speak out against American government plans to seize the country’s vast oil reserves. The meeting in London on Wednesday night was told that Iraq’s oil revenues account for some...
AFTER almost two days of discussions, the CWU leadership has rejected the call of the membership of the union for indefinite strike action, and for the formation of a public sector alliance to defeat the attacks of the Brown government, and to defend the jobs, and wages of all...
Communication Workers Union (CWU) members in Oxford, who walked out on strike in defence of a senior rep, have voted to continue their unofficial action. The workers attended a mass meeting yesterday at the Cowley Workers Centre where they were informed that more of their senior representatives, will be facing...
Senior doctors yesterday renewed a warning that private treatment centres are putting patient care at risk and destabilising the NHS. The British Medical Association (BMA) and other health unions slammed the millions of pounds being spent on block financing of the private treatment centres. The centres frequently fail to carry out...
After days of indecision, the Communication Workers Union leadership yesterday announced a series of rolling strikes over two weeks, instead of the indefinite national strike action their membership have been demanding. A CWU press statement said: ‘Although postal workers will individually take two days of strike action in the next...
ALMOST a third of young people (31 per cent) starting at university this autumn are being forced to live with their parents, because they cannot afford the costs of living away from home and pay the £3,000 annual tuition fee. This is the dire situation facing students, highlighted by a...
The Buncefield Major Incident Investigation Board (MIIB) on Tuesday published its 6th report, covering emergency preparedness for, response to and recovery from a major industrial incident. The MIIB has been investigating the December 2005 blast at the oil terminal in Buncefield, near Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, and its aftermath. Lord Newton, Chairman...
The TUC on Monday called on the government to ‘step back’ and initiate an ‘independent review’ of privately-sponsored academy schools. Before leaving office, Blair announced 400 new academy schools will be built. TUC general secretary Brendan Barber says in his forward to a new TUC report titled ‘A New...
The gap between the rich and poor has widened in recent years and is greater than at any time in the past 40 years, according to a report published by the Joseph Rowntree Trust yesterday. Poverty and Wealth Across Britain 1968 to 2005 found that the gap between the rich...
‘WE ARE going to escalate the strike action,’ a Communication Workers Union spokeswoman told News Line yesterday evening. However, she added that after a long national postal executive committee meeting ‘final details are being ironed out tonight and there will be an announcement in the morning.’ Billy Colvill, a CWU rep...
FAILING Tube privateer Metronet should get no more public money, and be ‘brought back in-house’ London Underground’s biggest union said yesterday. As the Public Private Partnership (PPP) Arbiter announced that Metronet was likely to get an interim extra £121 million of the £551 million it has asked for to cover...
METRONET, the Public-Private-Partnership (PPP) within London Underground, has collapsed financially after years of failure to provide services required by the capital’s transport system. It is about to go into administration. Aslef general secretary, Keith Norman, said yesterday that it would be ‘perverse’ for Gordon Brown to fail to admit that...
BRITAIN is staring defeat in the face in Afghanistan according to Paddy Ashdown and Lord Inge, the ex-Chief of Staff, British army. In a House of Lords debate on Afghanistan late last week, former Bosnia supremo Paddy Ashdown said he was sorry to have to deliver ‘a somewhat bleak message’...
AT the same time as leading members of the Bush administration are seeking to shut down the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp after experiencing a series of humiliating defeats at the hands of the US judiciary, the British police force are seeking to impose Guantanamo Bays here, where ‘terrorist...
THE Israeli government is permitting Nayif Hawatimah and Faruq al-Kaddoumi to attend the PLO Central Committee’s meeting in Ramallah. The approval constitutes an acceptance of President Abbas’ request to permit senior members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and the Democratic Front for the Liberation...