Monthly Archives: March 2008
AROUND 150 people marched from Blackheath past Lewisham Hospital to a rally in Ladywell Park on Saturday, against plans to shut the south London hospital’s Accident and Emergency department, maternity and paediatrics units. A leaflet calling the march said: ‘NHS London commissioned Professor Sir George Alberti to review proposals for...
One-in-three workers skip medical care because of the cost, a nationwide survey of more than 26,000 people carried out by the AFL-CIO union organisation has shown. America’s health care system is failing even those who have insurance, an unprecedented 26,419-person survey sponsored by the AFL-CIO and Working America confirmed last...
SCHOOLS Secretary Ed Balls and his predecessor Alan Johnson have given the go-head to the sell-off of 19 school playing fields over the past year and a further 53 school and community playing fields are under threat. Margaret Morrissey from the National Confederation of Parent Teachers Associations (NCPTA) told a...
HEALTH workers, trade unionists, pensioners and residents from the SE London boroughs of Lewisham, Greenwich, Bexley and Bromley are marching today against plans to close University Hospital, Lewisham as a District General Hospital. The demonstration is assembling at 11am outside All Saints Church, Blackheath, and marching along Belmont Hill to...
AS Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s 72-hour amnesty deadline for militia fighters in Basra to hand over their weapons ran out yesterday, this leader of the puppet Iraqi regime said that it had been extended by another 10 days and that the government will pay cash for arms. In a statement...
The Independent Asylum Commission (IAC) on Thursday issued its interim report on its nationwide citizens review of the UK asylum system. In 2006 the then Home Secretary, John Reid, included the asylum system in his condemnation of a department that was ‘not fit for purpose’. The Interim Findings provide a provisional...
AS IS to be expected the imperialists, with Britain in the lead, are engaging in an economic blockade, black propaganda, etc to get rid of Zimbabwe’s 84-year-old President Robert Mugabe, who is standing for re-election on March 29, and replace him with someone who will obediently do their bidding. A...
A ‘service reconfiguration’ for Outer South East London Service is being proposed. Outer South East London comprises the boroughs of Greenwich, Lewisham, Bexley and Bromley. The population of this area is around one million. They lie close to the inner London Boroughs of Southwark and Lambeth. The teaching hospitals of Kings...
The most comprehensive examination of the UK’s asylum system ever conducted has found it ‘marred by inhumanity’ and ‘not yet fit for purpose’. An interim report, published yesterday by the Independent Asylum Commission (IAC), is a damning indictment of the Home Office’s failure to deal fairly with those applying for...
IN the last days of the Bush presidency, the US military has unleashed the Iraqi puppet army, led by its Prime Minister Maliki, to attack the Mahdi army which controls the majority of Basra and has the support of the mass of the people, not just in that city...
TENANTS on demolition-threatened Aylesbury and Heygate council estates in Southwark, south-east London, are to march through the estates on Saturday April 5 to defend council housing. Aylesbury estate tenants voted in a ballot by more than 70 per cent against the privatisation of their homes, yet Southwark Council has plans...
TAMILNET has reported the call from South Africa expressing deep concern over the escalating violence in Sri Lanka, and calling for renewed negotiations to end the protracted conflict emphasising ‘no solution to this conflict can be found without the involvement of the two principal parties to...
GORDON Brown says Labour MPs will have a free vote on three ‘controversial parts’ of his embryo research Bill, thus giving way to the Roman Catholic Church which termed the Bill as a go-ahead to create ‘Frankensteins’. His proposal is designed to satisfy the Roman Catholics in the cabinet,...
Thousands of Hezbollah supporters made their way to southern Beirut on Monday in order to take part in a rally in the honour of Hezbollah’s top commander, Haj Imad Mughniyeh, assassinated in Damascus in February. Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah described Mughniyeh as the ‘leader of both victories’ referring to...
THE National Union of Teachers Conference in Manchester yesterday voted overwhelmingly to oppose military recruitment activities in schools. Motion 48 on War, accused the Ministry of Defence of using ‘sophisticated’ methods to lure youngsters, often in deprived areas, into the armed forces. It stated: ‘Conference congratulates colleagues in the Educational Institute...
DELEGATES at the National Union of Teachers (NUT) annual conference in Manchester have called for action over pay, privatisation and teachers’ workload. During the debates delegates called for mass rallies during the expected one day national pay strike on April 24. In his opening address, NUT President Bill Greenshields...
BY IRISH POLITICAL JOURNALIST JOHN COULTER The Castlerock massacre in Co Derry in which four Catholic workmen were shot dead could have been stopped if police had acted on tip-offs supplied by their touts inside the loyalist death squad, the Ulster Defence Association, nationalist sources have alleged. 25 March marks the...
LAST Wednesday’s general strike in Greece, against the government’s reactionary Pensions Bill, marks a most critical turning point in the fast developing revolutionary situation. The mass and militant strike and the huge demonstration in Athens have produced a sharp political crisis in the days since then, and forced the...
THE NUT conference has made it perfectly clear that teachers have had enough of the wage cutting and privatisation policies of the Brown government. Delegates demanded action over pay, privatisation and teachers’ workload. The mood of the conference was reflected by the NUT President Bill Greenshields in his opening address....
Workers participated in their millions last Wednesday in the biggest one-day general strike in Greece. It was called by the GSEE (Greek TUC) against the right-wing government’s Pensions Bill which slashes pensions, raises pension age by 5-15 years and loots workers’ Pensions Funds. Government offices, banks, chemical works, ports, refineries, shipyards,...
Teachers are heading for a conflict with the government over class sizes. The National Union of Teachers is to vote at its annual conference in Manchester this weekend for a legal requirement that the maximum class size is 20 by the year 2020. Teachers anger has been stirred by schools minister...
THE major British banks want to be able to use a ‘wider range’ of collateral, meaning their very dodgy mortgage portfolios, for the billions of the taxpayers’ money that they want to get their hands on from the Bank of England. Indeed they are now demanding this as their...
MARCH 2008 sees the US and UK armed forces and governments irreparably damaged as a result of their failure to subdue the Iraqi people in five years of a ruthless and murderous occupation of Iraq. This defeat has irreparably damaged them, making the Republicans unelectable in the US, while forcing...
The European Union (EU) has expressed serious concern over Sri Lanka’s rights abuses, TamilNet reported yesterday. In a press release issued on Tuesday, the EU noted with regret that the Independent International Group of Eminent Persons (IIGEP) has decided to terminate its work. The EU expressed concern that the...
Five years after the US-led invasion of Iraq, the country is in disarray, the human rights situation is disastrous, a climate of impunity prevails, the economy is in tatters and the refugee crisis continues to escalate. So says a new Amnesty International report, Carnage and Despair: Iraq five years on. It...
ROYAL MAIL managers have overwhelmingly rejected changes to their pensions in a ballot. Their union, Unite, revealed yesterday that there was an 85-per-cent vote to reject Royal Mail’s pensions plan. Unite National Secretary Paul Reuter said: ‘This is a massive rejection of Royal Mail’s decision to reduce the future pensions...
Prime Minister Brown yesterday announced to MPs that ‘the security service is to double in size to 4,000 personnel’. In a statement to the House of Commons, Brown said the ‘primary duty of government’ is ‘the protection of the British national interest’. He said that ‘following approval by the National...
THIS year’s St Patrick’s Day celebrations on Monday, March 17 were overshadowed by the 20th anniversaries of two of the most televised bloody massacres in the history of the Irish Troubles – the Milltown graveyard massacre and the brutal killings of two Army corporals in Belfast in 1988. However, both...
THE OFFICIAL annual rate of inflation leapt in February, according to the Office of National Statistics (ONS). Figures published yesterday showed that the Consumer Prices Index (CPI), which excludes housing costs, reached 2.5 per cent in February, up from 2.2 per cent in January. The Retail Prices Index (RPI), which...
The Unite trade union yesterday told Northern Rock that they will oppose any plans for compulsory redundancies at the publicly owned bank. Following the announcement that the Northern Rock restructuring plans will mean 2,500 job cuts by 2011, the union said it is ‘seeking assurances that the workforce will be...
THERE were picket lines outside Jobcentres and benefit offices in London and across the country yesterday, at the start of a two-day strike by more than 80,000 civil servants working for the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). Charlie McDonald, PCS branch secretary for the union’s DWP east London branch,...
Billions of dollars, euros, pounds and yen were wiped off the world’s stock markets yesterday, as they reacted to the emergency bail-out of US investment bank Bear Stearns on Sunday. At a press conference on Sunday evening, the JP Morgan Chase bank announced that it had purchased Bear Stearns for...
THE divided town of Mitrovica was in turmoil yesterday morning, after UNMIK police and KFOR troops, in a major provocation, stormed a local court to arrest 50 Serbs, who were occupying the court. At 0530 hours several hundred heavily armed police surrounded the court, where Serb...
THIS book shows that Independent Sector Treatment Centres (ISTCs) have been introduced to give contracts to private companies to provide care for NHS patients, in competition with NHS hospitals, in order to spearhead the setting up of a market in healthcare in Britain. The authors conclude that the real...
ON SATURDAY more than 1,000 British Airways pilots marched on BA’s Heathrow headquarters over plans by BA to use non-BA pilots, in its new Open Skies subsidiary, on cut rate pay and conditions of service. BA is emulating Aer Lingus which recently moved from Shannon to Belfast airport, and announced...
Up to 80,000 members of the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS), working for the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), today begin a second two-day strike. The strike over the imposition of a below-inflation pay offer will hit Jobcentres, benefits offices, the Pension Service and Child Support Agency (CSA). The...
OVER 400 people attended the Chagos Islands Community Association rally in central London on Saturday evening, to demand the Chagossians’ right to return to their islands and the closure of the American base on the main island, Diego Garcia. Chairman Sheila Torrance opened the rally. The first speaker, Labour MP John...
US Republican presidential candidate John McCain, due in London next week to meet premier Gordon Brown, has said in advance of the visit that the British withdrawal from Basra has put security in danger in southern Iraq. He has added that a premature withdrawal of US troops will lead to...
ON the fifth anniversary of the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, the working class and the young people of the UK and the US, the aggressor states, are faced with taking decisive action to secure the withdrawal of all US and UK forces from Iraq and Afghanistan, and to...
‘We call on all trade unionists and anti-war campaigners to support this good cause, Chagos Islands Community Association chairwoman, Hengride Permal, said yesterday. ‘We need support for us to return to our islands and be compensated for our pain and suffering during our 40 years of exile. ‘We want to see...
All District General Hospitals in the South East London area are to be ‘radically overhauled’ with their Accident & Emergency facilities closed, according to a consultation document ‘A Picture of Health’, circulated by joint Primary Care Trust bosses. The document claims great benefits and a modern health service will emerge...
Disability charities yesterday expressed concerns over Labour’s plans to introduce harsh work tests and force almost two million people off incapacity benefit. In his Budget speech on Wednesday, chancellor Darling said: ‘Welfare reform makes work pay and encourages people off benefits.’ He added: ‘From April 2010 all long-term recipients of incapacity...
ON August 15 1971, the then president of the United States, Richard Nixon ended the gold backing for the US dollar, which up till then was being treated as being as good as gold. Between the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 and August 15 1971 the dollar was exchangeable...