Monthly Archives: July 2007
HUMAN rights groups yesterday condemned a call from UK police chiefs for indefinite detention without charge or trial. Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) president Ken Jones, who has been supported by Met Police chief Ian Blair, claimed that police needed to be able to hold terrorist suspects without charge...
ON THE second day of CWU strike action against the Post Office’s wage-cutting and job-cutting attacks, Tony O’Donovan, unit rep in the largest Crawley CWU branch, SE No. 5, told News Line that the strike had won excellent support. He praised other trade union branches in the area such as...
OVER 1,000 striking postal workers converged on the headquarters of Royal Mail yesterday to demand management enter ‘meaningful talks with the CWU (Communication Workers Union) on resolving pay and major change’ and withdraw the threat of 40,000 sackings and attacks on working conditions. Leaders of the CWU handed in a...
TONY WOODLEY the TGWU leader and co-leader of the new UNITE trade union has already presided over the closure of a large chunk of the motor car industry in this country. He helped shut down the Rover group in 2000, the Vauxhall Motors Luton plant in 2002, the Birmingham...
THE Brown government is showing clearly and conclusively that it stands with the bosses, the bankers, and the employers against the workers and their trade unions. Among Brown’s first actions as PM was to give unelected right wingers Digby Jones and Ara Darzi ministers’ jobs, using the House...
ANGRY lecturers at London Metropolitan University (London Met) are expected to vote to strike in a ballot starting next week, to demand that the university immediately recognises their union and withdraws plans for the sacking of 60 academics. Staff say that London Met is refusing to recognise the University and...
CWU London Regional Secretary John Denton told News Line yesterday, minutes before the 24 hour strike action began: ‘Our members are determined to see this through until they get a decent negotiated settlement. ‘Our members want Royal Mail to come into negotiations – the sooner the better for our members,...
THE US dollar, reflecting the crisis of the US capitalist economy, is now sinking fast against both the euro and the pound sterling. Rising UK and EU interest rates have seen the euro rise to $1.38 while the pound is now worth more than $2 for the first...
BOSSES of London Met University were yesterday accused of acting like ‘19th century mill owners’ at a rally outside the Holloway Road campus in north London, attended by over 100 lecturers, union leaders and students. Respect MP George Galloway, whose constituency covers part of the university, attended the rally, along...
Health minister Ara Darzi’s plans ‘are a massive attack on hospital care in London’, warned consultant surgeon Anna Athow yesterday. Darzi is conducting a review of healthcare in England. His just-published London plans are a blueprint for the rest of the country. Darzi claims that ‘the days of district...
HUNDREDS of people took part in Tuesday’s picket by North East London Council of Action against the closure of Chase Farm Hospital A&E and other key departments. Large numbers signed up to join the Council of Action, which is calling for an occupation to stop the closure going ahead. Chase Farm...
THE International Energy Agency has predicted that oil demand is set to leap beyond the capacity to supply, sending oil prices soaring well beyond the current $74 a barrel, and to levels of over $100 a barrel. There is no doubt that this critical situation for world capitalism will...
The National Union of Teachers (NUT) will be lobbying the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DfCSF) on Wednesday, 11 July 2007 to publicise its concerns and to underline the strength of feeling in calling for a postponement of the changes relating to the employment of overseas trained teachers....
THE North East London Council of Action yesterday held a successful picket against the closure of Chase Farm Hospital A&E, maternity and paediatric departments. Hundreds of people took part in the picket during the course of the day, as workers and local residents expressed their support for action to stop...
ROYAL College of Nursing members in England will be asked next Monday if they favour a ballot for strike action to force the government to implement the Pay Review Body’s recommendation of a 2.5 per cent pay award. This ballot is the union’s reply to the Brown government’s decision to...
Palestinian citizens stranded at the Egyptian side of the Rafah border terminal declared on Sunday that they had entered the second stage of their hunger strike, which started two days earlier, and would consume water and salt only. The abandoned civilians said in a statement that the step followed the...
PRESIDENT George W Bush’s plan to stabilise Iraq through a military ‘surge’ is ‘a lost cause’, said the New York Times last Sunday. The New York newspaper’s evidence for the prosecution is unanswerable. It states: ‘Like many Americans, we have put off that conclusion, waiting for a sign that President...
Over 60 people protested outside St Helier Hospital in Carshalton, Surrey, yesterday morning, against the ‘downgrading’ of its sister Epsom Hospital. The protest was called to mark the first day at work of the new Epsom and St Helier NHS Trust Chief Executive. In a lively demonstration at the St Helier...
The family of Nadeem Dean Khan led a 200-strong demonstration through Burnley, Lancashire, on Saturday to protest against the 28-year-old man’s death in police custody. ‘There are a lot of questions to be answered and we are determined to find out the truth,’ the family said in a statement issued...
FORTY-SIX universities, mainly but not entirely made up of ex-Polytechnics, were put on a list by the Labour government, after the introduction of tuition fees, as being deeply in debt and candidates for bankruptcy and closure. The secret list, made public by the use of the Freedom of Information Act,...
Last Thursday’s pay rise for minimum award wage workers, the lowest in ten years, is below the rate of inflation and means the living standards of many working Australians will go backwards, says the Australian Congress of Trade Unions (ACTU). ACTU President Sharan Burrow said on Friday: ‘The pay rise...
THREE-QUARTERS of newly-qualified nurses are unable to find jobs because trusts are freezing recruitment, the RCN (Royal College of Nursing) said yesterday. The (RCM) Royal College of Midwives added that for the same reason, although 3,000 more midwives are needed nationwide, 20 per cent of last year’s newly-qualified midwives failed...
IT was Harold Macmillan back in the days of ‘You have never had it so good’ in the late 1950s and early 1960s who unveiled the ‘property owning democracy’, declaring that a nation of house owners would be an uncrossable barrier for socialism and socialists. Margaret Thatcher carried forward this...
THE trade union campaign to reverse the closure of 43 Remploy factories received a significant boost when the All Party Group of MPs published details today of their enquiry into the future of Remploy and the closure programme announced in May 2007. The MPs’ report says, ‘We recommend that Remploy...
THE Communication Workers Union yesterday announced its latest plans for strike action after the first national strike for a decade last week, which was described by leaders of the CWU as the best supported strike ever in the Royal Mail. Postal workers face wage cuts, casualisation, privatisation and an attempt...
Health unions yesterday warned the government that if it fails to improve on its pay-cutting offer they will proceed with strike ballots. UNISON said: ‘New Health Secretary Alan Johnson has agreed to urgently re-open discussions on health workers pay, following the call for talks last week by the UK’s largest...
yesterday the Communication Workers Union (CWU) announced a further day of strike action commencing the evening of Thursday 12th July and continuing through Friday 13th July. Royal Mail group workers will begin 24 hours of strike action with shifts commencing after 1900 hours. In announcing the strike, the CWU said it...
ANGRY teachers, parents and pupils from closure-threatened Highshore special school in Peckham attended a meeting of the Nunhead and Peckham Rye Community Council on Wednesday night. The meeting was also lobbied by the National Union of Teachers (NUT), in opposition to plans for another privately-sponsored City Academy in Southwark, south...
IT IS AN indisputable fact that Alan Johnston, the BBC journalist, was freed by the Hamas movement just two weeks after Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip from the political friends of the US and British governments, who are grouped around President Abbas and were unable to free...
A SHAM paramilitary demobilisation process, combined with thousands of cases of threats and killings and a chronic lack of investigations and prosecutions, makes Colombia one of the most dangerous places in the world for trade unionists, according to a new report released today. Amnesty International’s report, Killings, arbitrary detentions, and...
THE TGWU conference yesterday passed Composite Motion 29 with just one delegate voting against it. This called ‘for the immediate withdrawal of UK troops from Iraq, in order to comply with the United Nations call for the withdrawal of occupation forces by December 2005.’ Moving Motion 29, Daniel Murphy, Region Three...
THE leadership of the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU) was shaken at the union’s biennial delegate conference in Brighton yesterday, when a substantial number of delegates voted for Motion 106, calling on the union to refuse to issue repudiation letters if their members take ‘unofficial’ industrial action. The motion...
GATE Gourmet locked-out workers were accused by TGWU General Secretary Tony Woodley in his speech to delegates on the opening day of their union’s biennial conference in Brighton on Monday afternoon of being ‘vulnerable workers’ who had been taken advantage of by the ‘ultra-left’. After refusing to talk to...
DELEGATES at the TGWU Biennial Delegate Conference in Brighton yesterday gave their full support to Salford Council workers who will be taking more strike action in defence of agency workers. The Salford workers held a one-day strike last Wednesday, and are currently engaged in an overtime ban and a work-to-rule....
GORDON Brown in his budget got rid of the lowest rate of tax, 10p in the pound, thereby setting out to further punish the poor. He also promised a war on benefit ‘fraudsters’ of all kinds, and pledged that the drive to place the sick and the disabled into work...
THE British Medical Association (BMA) leadership had a plan for the 2007 Annual Representative Meeting (ARM) in Torquay last week. They wanted to push through acceptance of the government’s privatisation agenda, which they had failed to manage at the 2006 ARM. There was however a battle at the conference with the...
A PACKED meeting of over 100 Gate Gourmet locked out workers and delegates to the TGWU Biennial Conference in Brighton took place yesterday lunchtime. Locked-out worker Lakhinder Saran explained to the meeting that when they came to work at 6.00am on August 10, 2005, the Gate Gourmet workers...
YESTERDAY the US military was linking Iran directly to attacks on their troops, including an attack at Karbala in which five US troops were killed. The accusation by General Bergner follows the statement of the US ambassador to Iraq at the end of last week that there were no talks...
THE Transport and General Workers Union Biennial Delegate Conference in Brighton yesterday heard a call for the nationalisation of Jaguar and Land Rover to save jobs. Speaking in support of the Emergency Supplementary Report of the General Executive Council – Jaguar/Land Rover, Welsh delegate Rob Williams said: ‘The next stage...
The five week inquest into the restraint-related death of 15-year-old Gareth Myatt, who died in the privately run Rainsbrook Secure Training Centre (STC) in April 2004, finished last Thursday. The inquest jury found his death could have been prevented. Gareth Myatt choked on his own vomit and died of ‘positional asphyxia’...
EIGHTY Afghan civilians were murdered in US and British air strikes last Friday in the Gereshk district of Helmand province in Afghanistan. Three British soldiers and three Afghan civilians were wounded and one UK soldier was killed yesterday, Gereshk mayor Dur Ali Shah said, as the Taleban hit...
A COACHLOAD of sacked Gate Gourmet workers is lobbying the TGWU’s Biennial Conference in Brighton this morning. They are currently taking forward a large number of cases for racial discrimination against Gate Gourmet despite the fact that the TGWU has withdrawn its legal support for their claim. In the Generic...
THE failed terror attacks on Park Lane and Glasgow Airport far from being a huge blow against British imperialism will in fact be welcomed by it. This is because they will allow its government, led by Gordon Brown, to bring in draconian anti-working class security legislation that will virtually abolish...