Monthly Archives: October 2007
Metropolitan Police firearms officers were issued with special ‘instant kill’ bullets to use against innocent young Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes on 22 July 2005, the Old Bailey heard yesterday. Giving hooded evidence in the health and safety trial of the Office of the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, a senior...
EVERY day Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his Health Secretary Alan Johnson churn out propaganda about ‘improving’ the National Health Service (NHS) and people’s health. Yesterday, government officials were talking about an ‘obesity crisis’, while the reality is that the number of public health staff working in the NHS has...
OVER 200 civil servants gave a standing ovation to colleague Sheila Coote at a lunchtime rally in Westminster last Friday, as she vowed to resist compulsory privatisation of her job at the newly-formed DCSF (schools ministry). ‘They’re treating us like fixtures and fittings,’ she told the rally organised by the...
THE reply of the leaders of the CWU postal workers union, Billy Hayes and Dave Ward, to the injunction obtained by the ruthless Royal Mail management team, declaring today’s and tomorrow’s Mail Centre and Mail Delivery offices strikes illegal, was to immediately capitulate and make the deal that Royal...
‘Reject this agreement and carry on with the industrial action,’ Billy Colvill, CWU rep from south east London, yesterday urged the union’s postal executive, which meets today. Speaking at the over 400-strong Gate Gourmet sacked workers second anniversary benefit rally in Southall, west London, he condemned an attempt by CWU...
RUSSIAN President Vladimir Putin threatened on Friday in talks with top US administration officials, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defence Secretary Robert Gates, to abandon a key nuclear missile treaty unless Washington freezes its plans for a NATO anti-missile shield along Russia’s western border. Russia has also threatened...
By Sanath Rathnaweera COLOMBO – 170,000 out of Sri Lanka’s 200,000 teachers took part in a one day strike action on September 13th, that was provoked by the country’s reactionary government. As the long term problem of anomalies of wages faced by the teachers was not solved by the...
Sunday 14 October, 2-8pm Southall Community Centre Merrick Road, Southall (nr Southall station) Beat Gate Gourmet & other cheap labour bosses! Support our cases for racial discrimination against Gate Gourmet! RALLY STARTS 2pm speakers include John McDonnell, Hayes MP; Varinder Sharma, Southall MP Ken Loach film director; Hengride Permal Chagos Islands Comm Assn; in a personal capacity Richard Kassir,...
Communication Workers Union (CWU) leaders were in talks again with Royal Mail bosses yesterday while thousands of postal workers were out on a second day of management provoked unofficial strikes. ‘700 to 800 are out on unofficial strike here, while many others are working to rule,’ Liverpool CWU branch secretary...
THE blood price paid by the public for the running of the NHS as a business, with the private sector at its centre and not as a service, is now emerging with massive force in the filthy, superbug ridden hospitals that now exist in the UK. The Private Finance Initiative...
DEMONSTRATORS picketing the High Court on Wednesday, at the start of a court case against the government, demanded an immediate end to British arms exports to Israel. The case was brought by 60-year-old Saleh Hasan, from Bethlehem, whose farm was bulldozed in 2005 to make way for the Israeli Annexation...
THERE is widespread opposition amongst members of the United Auto Workers (UAW) trade union in America to the deal its leaders agreed to call off strike action at General Motors. At stake is the future of jobs, healthcare cover and pensions at the car giant. The ‘Future of the Union website...
POSTAL workers in towns and cities all over the UK were forced out on unofficial strike yesterday morning when management sought to impose the massive flexibility changes that the CWU membership have rejected and have been fighting with strike actions for the last three months. At the same time Labour...
ROYAL Mail’s bullying management, backed to the hilt by the Brown government, yesterday sought to impose extreme flexibility onto the country’s postal workers, provoking walk-outs in Glasgow, Manch-ester, Liverpool, Oxford, and East London. About 30 pickets were outside the East London Mail Centre and E16 Delivery Office at...
AT A TIME when his office is on trial over the state execution of Jean Charles de Menezes, Metropolitan Police chief Sir Ian Blair has turned up at the House of Commons to demand the right for the police to hold suspects for up to 90 days without having...
TEN thousand people forced the police to retreat from their stated position that a march on parliament would be illegal, and that they would take action to prevent it, when they marched to the House of Commons on Monday afternoon. Contingents from Penzance to Manchester took part in the demonstration...
AT THE CWU rally at Central Hall yesterday afternoon, CWU leader Billy Hayes presented a successful outcome of the postal workers struggle as relying on getting PM Gordon Brown to intervene on their behalf to tell Royal Mail to act honourably and make a decent settlement with the CWU...
GORDON Brown yesterday, at his monthly press conference, condemned the striking postal workers and their union the CWU. He called their strike action in defence of their conditions of service and pensions ‘unacceptable’ and continued to threaten to cut the financing of the Post Office and the Royal...
A FOREIGN Ministry spokesman said in Tehran last Sunday that the allegations being made by US General David Petraeus were baseless. Petraeus said on Saturday that arrested Iranian diplomats were members of the Revolutionary Guards Qods force. Talking to reporters, Mohammad Ali Hoseyni said that the remarks by the...
‘We offer our full solidarity,’ civil servants’ union PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka told a 500-strong rally of striking postal workers in central London yesterday. Serwotka added: ‘Every member of the CWU (Communication Workers Union) deserves a decent pay rise, pension and a job. ‘We face the same as you...
YESTERDAY the bourgeois media reported that Britain’s Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, who came to office pledging that the UK would cease to be Bush’s poodle, has agreed that UK forces will support US air and ground strikes on Iranian Republican Guard bases. These strikes will be mounted in response to...
Manufacturing jobs and the United Autoworkers Union (UAW) are at risk together from two-tier wages in the GM ‘Tentative Contract’, warn rank-and-file UAW workers at General Motors. With ratification due to be completed on Wednesday October 10, Gary Walkowicz/UAW Local 600 urges rejection of the deal reached by the UAW...
Postal workers yesterday called for public sector unions to come out on strike with them on the eve of the second of two 48-hour strikes by the Communication Workers Union (CWU). Referring to the strike action from last Thursday to Saturday, Paddington’s West London Mail Centre CWU acting area processing...
THE PCS General Secretary and National President sent a message of solidarity to striking CWU members in the Royal Mail yesterday. Their message, to CWU General Secretary Billy Hayes, read: ‘I am writing to offer the full support and solidarity of PCS members for the strike by your members in...
LAST THURSDAY at 2pm as the postal workers came out on their 48-hour strike, the PCS civil service union sent a special message to the postal workers. Signed by Mark Serwotka, General Secretary, and Janice Godrich, National President, the letter said that they were ‘writing to offer the full...
‘We’re fighting for our jobs, terms and conditions, pensions, the future of the union and the future of the business,’ Communication Workers Union (CWU) SW London Area Processing Rep Paul Cox told News line yesterday. He was speaking on the picket line outside the giant Nine Elms sorting and delivery...
LABOUR Prime Minister Brown, a cautious and bumbling, conservative politician, is due to decide this weekend whether to take a big gamble and call a snap general election for early November. He thinks that if he wins he will be able to make a claim that he has a mandate...
US President George W Bush on Wednesday vetoed a bill to expand the State Children's Health Insurance Programme (SCHIP), after it was passed with a large majority in the Senate. Bush argues it takes the programme beyond its original purpose of insuring children from low-income families. The vetoed bill proposed higher...
THE current farce that is being played out, of trying a police death squad under the health and safety laws, is not only a cynical mockery of the victim’s family, it is a continuation of the cover up operation that has been undertaken ever since Jean Charles de Menezes,...
‘THE most dramatic strategic shift of the balance against ordinary citizens, especially the ill and infirm, in over a generation, has been the drive towards privatisation implicit in the move to co-locate hospitals’, SIPTU trade union General President Jack O’Connor told delegates at the opening of the union’s biennial...
‘Our union executive should immediately call off the talks with Royal Mail until the threats of redundancy, total flexibility, and attacks on our pension scheme have been withdrawn.’ So said the chairman of HP Section South Central Number 1 CWU Branch, Rob Bolton yesterday. CWU (Communication Workers Union) leaders have been...
THE US banks are now having to declare their indebtedness. Citigroup has lost $6 billion in a third quarter of this year write down, as the US sub-prime mortgage crisis gathers even more speed. Merryl Lynch, meanwhile is expected to declare even bigger losses. Outside the US, Swiss bank UBS also...
THE Palestinian newspaper Al-Quds in an editorial called ‘Settlements and Water Anew’, which appeared on October 1, exposes Israeli efforts to prevent the formation of a viable, independent Palestinian state. It states: ‘The document revealed by the PLO Negotiation Affairs Department the day before yesterday about Israel’s intense efforts to...
Private security firm Blackwater USA, which sent its mercenaries to Iraq, has been condemned as being ‘dangerously out of control’ after nearly 200 shootings by its operatives in Iraq since 2005. A just-released US Congressional committee report says Blackwater has covered up fatal shootings involving its employees, is the first...
THE Communication Workers Union has said it is prepared to ‘settle around inflation’ for the next two years. Given that ‘around’ means less, and that the official figure for inflation understates the real inflation rate, this would mean accepting a pay cut for their members at Royal Mail for the...
AS PAY negotiations between the American car giants General Motors (GM) and Ford, and the United Auto Workers (UAW) have reached a critical point, company chiefs are threatening to close down their operations in the United States and shift production to low-wage countries in Latin America and Asia. Commenting on...
The Egyptian People’s Assembly Arab Affairs Committee has denounced the US Congress resolution to divide Iraq into three states on religious and ethnic bases. The committee said that such a decision slams international legitimacy and violates the country’s national sovereignty. A statement released on Sunday by the committee chaired by Sa’d...
In a statement on Saturday to mark the 7th anniversary of the Palestinian Intifada, Hamas warned of a ‘dangerous plot in accordance with a Zionist-American plan aimed at settling the Palestinian issue with the participation of Palestinian symbols’. The statement said: ‘The blessed Al-Aqsa Intifada enters its eight year more...
TWO hundred firefighters and control room staff were joined by thousands of angry local residents in a 13-mile march from Camborne to Falmouth on Saturday, to ‘Save Cornwall’s Fire Service’. The deaths of three people as the Penhallow Hotel in Newquay burnt to the ground in August has caused uproar...
UNITED States President George Bush declared at the end of last week: ‘I call on all nations that have influence with the (Myanmar) regime to join us in supporting the aspirations of the Burmese people and to tell the Burmese junta to cease using force on its own people.’ The...