Monthly Archives: January 2008
The six trade unions – ACM, ATL, GMB, UCU, UNISON and UNITE – representing 250,000 further education staff yesterday submitted a pay claim for six per cent or £1,500, whichever is the greater. The catch-up claim covers Further Education (FE) workers in England including lecturers, learning support staff, cleaners, managers,...
THERE is a war taking place in Sri Lanka, in which the government of President Rajipakse, armed, equipped, trained and financially supported by the UK and the US, is setting out to massacre and terrorise the Tamil people, and at the same time drive back the Sri Lankan trade...
Egyptian security forces attempting to resume control of the Egyptian frontier with the Gaza Strip began using barbed wire to close gaps in the border wall on Tuesday morning. Since Wednesday last week, hundreds of thousands of Gazans crossed the newly-opened Egyptian-Gaza border, mainly to shop for supplies made scarce...
THE deeper the crisis of the capitalist system gets, the more desperate the measures that it takes to sustain the bosses and bankers’ system, the more that Prime Minister Brown steps up into the breach to try to prove conclusively to the ruling class that he is their man....
UP TO 8,000 demonstrators took part in a mass picket of Downing Street on Monday, to protest against the visit of Pakistan’s military ruler General Musharraf. Just weeks after the assassination of Pakistan opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, Musharraf travelled to London to meet Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Demonstrators shouted: ‘Go Musharraf,...
‘WE’RE opposed to workfare, our position has not changed on that,’ a TUC spokesman told News Line yesterday. He was responding to speeches by Prime Minister Brown and new Work and Pensions Secretary Purnell at a conference of ‘business leaders’ in London which proposed forced labour. Brown said the government’s ‘Ready...
TRUE to form, Brown the bankers’ prime minister, opened his speech on apprentices yesterday by hailing the employers saying: ‘I am delighted to join you today to celebrate the achievements of employers up and down the country . . .’ He went on to slap down the TUC...
CLOSURE-THREATENED theatre companies are lobbying today’s meeting of the Arts Council in the Roundhouse in Camden, North West London today at 1.30pm, demanding a reversal of the ‘death sentence’ cuts imposed on 200 companies around the country. Freelance theatre director and organiser of the Norwich march against Arts Council cuts...
Gate Gourmet sacked workers outside the Reading Tribunal last Friday, where they were seeking a review of the tribunal judge’s decision that their 32 racial discrimination cases would not be going forward. Pictured at the back, centre, is their barrister Caspar Glyn, of the Cloisters Temple. Second from the...
FOLLOWING the recent expulsion by the Afghan puppet government of two British diplomats – they were carrying out secret negotiations with the Taleban in Helmand province – the Afghan president has named Paddy Ashdown, the former SBS soldier, Lib Dem leader and one time combined EU special envoy and...
Legal charity INQUEST yesterday condemned government proposals in the Counter-Terrorism Bill 2008 which ‘give unprecedented powers to the Secretary of State to intervene in death in custody inquests where issues of state intelligence are involved’. INQUEST said in a statement: ‘Section 64 of the Bill gives the Secretary of State...
‘FREE Gaza now! Free Gaza now!’ was the cry of 5,000 mainly young people who swelled a mass picket opposite Downing Street on Saturday, in a demonstration of support for the Palestinian people and their struggle against the Israeli siege of the Gaza Strip. Banners from the University and College...
The report by Brigadier Aitken on British Army abuses of Iraqi civilians is ‘a complete red herring and a whitewash’, said lawyers Phil Shiner and Martyn Day yesterday. Shiner is from Public Interest Lawyers (PIL), who say they are acting in cases involving scores of Iraqis tortured, killed or executed...
THE Palestinian revolution has shown the way forward by blowing a massive hole in the Rafah border crossing into Egypt, so that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians could smash their way out of the Gaza ‘concentration camp’ to get much needed food and fuel. They have achieved what all...
ISRAEL has turned Gaza into a ‘concentration camp’, demonstrators warned on Thursday night, at an emergency picket opposite Downing Street attended by over 50 people, demanding: ‘End the siege on Gaza!’ All through the two-hour-long picket, they chanted slogans including: ‘Free, Free Palestine!’, ‘Lift the Siege on Gaza!’, ‘From the...
A CLOSED Arts Council meeting is being held in the Roundhouse in Camden, north west London on Tuesday at 1.30pm, to ratify swingeing ‘death sentence’ cuts to 200 theatres and theatre companies around the country. Arts Council spokesman Emma Russell told News Line yesterday: ‘It is a closed meeting, not...
PETER HAIN – the former Young Liberal radical, and then leader, in the 1970s of the Anti-Apartheid campaign and then the Anti-Nazi League – resigned yesterday from his two government positions, as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, and Secretary of State for Wales. His is the classic story...
Work and Pensions Secretary and Welsh Secretary Peter Hain yesterday quit the Cabinet after his late declaration of £103,000 of donations to his Labour Party deputy leadership campaign was referred to the Metropolitan Police. Hain quit within minutes of the Electoral Commission saying that it had decided to refer...
GAZANS poured into Egypt for a second consecutive day on Thursday to stock up on supplies after militants blew open the border barrier of the Hamas-run territory, witnesses said. Thousands of people continued to cross the border, most of them intent on buying goods on the Egyptian side a week...
ON the eve of yesterday’s 15,000 strong Police Federation demonstration through London, against the staging of their 2.6 per cent pay award, reducing it to 1.9 per cent for the year, the General Secretary of the TUC, Brendan Barber, sent a letter of support to the chairwoman of the...
TUESDAY’S mass picket of Chase Farm Hospital heard that the decision to close the hospital’s A&E, Maternity and Paediatric Departments has been ‘put on hold’. Organised by the North East London Council of Action, it was the tenth monthly picket of the much-needed Enfield hospital since last March and one...
The British Medical Association (BMA) yesterday insisted it is ‘fighting to preserve the NHS’. Responding to a news article in Pulse magazine on the BMA’s impasse with government on extended hours, Dr Laurence Buckman, chairman of the BMA’s GPs’ Committee, said: ‘The BMA is not encouraging or even asking GPs...
NATO has developed a tactic for halting the ‘imminent’ spread of nuclear weapons or of other weapons of mass destruction. This is a formula tailor-made for confronting and attacking states such as Iran who are standing fast by their rights, in Iran’s case its right to develop nuclear power for...
THE Lebanese Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah issued a strong warning to Israel in his Ashura Day address in Beirut, last Saturday. Speaking on this major Muslim holy day commemorating the Imam Al-Husayn, Nasrallah said: ‘Today, O brothers and sisters, our nation faces a bellicose and arrogant enemy, who places...
At 7am yesterday morning, Chancellor Alistair Darling issued a statement to the London Stock Exchange. He outlined plans to convert the £25bn of taxpayers’ money handed to the Northern Rock bank, in the form of a Bank of England loan, into Treasury-backed bonds. This is so parcels of Northern Rock debt...
BROWN and the Treasury have announced that they prefer a private sector ‘solution’ to the Northern Rock bank crisis, while Brown’s spin doctors have revealed that he does not want to be associated in any way with ‘old Labour socialism’, that is with the nationalisation of a bank. ...
RUSSIA’S military chief of staff General Baluyevsky has said Russia is ready to use force, pre-emptively if necessary and with nuclear weapons, to defend itself against the threats coming from countries that are seeking ‘global hegemony’. His words were: ‘We do not intend to attack anyone, but we consider it...
THE Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, was yesterday forced to deny that he was directly negotiating a ‘sweetheart’ deal with Virgin’s Richard Branson to allow him massive state aid to purchase the bankrupt Northern Rock bank. Branson is one of the two dozen or so bosses accompanying Labour leader Brown on...
On Saturday, Norwich saw an impressively large, cheerful and determined demonstration as a thousand arts workers marched against the funding cuts imposed without consultation by the Arts Council on art organisations in the Eastern Region. Represented were Creative Arts East, Eastern Angles Theatre Company, Norwich Puppet Theatre, Kings Lynn Arts...
‘It will be the biggest march against the funding cuts imposed by Arts Council England so far,’ organisers of today’s march through Norwich said yesterday. ‘Arts Council England is wielding an executioner’s axe over renowned and established arts organisations in Norfolk,’ they added, ‘but it is not just Norfolk...
YESTERDAY morning Israel announced that all the crossings between the Gaza Strip and Israel were closed. Israeli Defence Minister, Ehud Barak issued instructions to close the crossings on Thursday night, as Israel turned the screw of hunger and cold much tighter against the Palestinians of the...
the Accountability and Justice Law is a ‘worthless’ piece of paper, approved by a ‘worthless and false parliament’, a ‘Ba’ath party spokesman’ in Iraq has warned. Al-Jazeera carried an interview with Abu-Muhammad, described as a spokesman for the Ba’ath party in Baghdad, on the adoption of the Accountability and Justice...
EVERY year the Labour government is handing over £40bn to the consortia of financiers, property developers and construction giants in payments for Private Finance Initiative (PFI) deals. In the 1990s, these capitalist speculators got the willing leaderships of both the Tory and Labour parties to adopt the PFI to build...
HEZBOLLAH Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah has decried the recent bombing in Beirut, whilst warning that outgoing US President Bush’s visit to the Middle East was aimed at re-shaping the region. In an hour-long speech on Tuesday in southern Beirut, Nasrallah said of the bombing that took place in the city on...
Public sector unions yesterday condemned the huge fees being charged for making ‘operational changes’ to contracts by PFI privateers. This followed a National Audit Office (NAO) report which found that PFI main contractors have been charging widely varied fees for simple maintenance tasks, with examples of the cost of fitting...
IT IS estimated that 7.4 million people in England and Wales have not been to a National Health Service dentist since April 2006, because they cannot find a dentist working within the NHS in their area. This is the devastating situation facing millions of people discovered by a survey carried...
Billions of pounds, euros and yen were wiped off European and Asian share prices yesterday as markets responded to Tuesday’s collapse on Wall Street over huge US banking and corporate losses. Billions of dollars were wiped off share prices on the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday with the ...
FURIOUS actors demonstrated in Piccadilly Circus on Tuesday against swinging Arts Council cuts which threaten to close nearly 200 theatres and theatre companies around the country. Many on the 500-strong demonstration said that these companies are the lifeblood of the British theatre and demanded Equity takes the lead in defending...
THE content of the Bush ‘peace offensive’ was yesterday revealed for the whole world to see when Israeli tanks, supported by artillery fire advanced into the outskirts of Gaza City killing eleven Palestinians and wounding 50. Among the dead was Husam Zahhar, the son of senior...
The National Union of Teachers (NUT) yesterday rejected a proposed three-year pay deal for teachers as a pay cut and warned there will be a ‘robust response’. NUT General Secretary Steve Sinnott said: ‘Teachers will be worse off. ‘This pay settlement of 2.45 per cent for 2008 is well below the...