Monthly Archives: June 2008
HEZBOLLAH has slammed the delay in forming a new government in Lebanon, as ‘sectarian incitement’. Following a Loyalty to the Resistance Bloc meeting at the Chamber of Deputies last Wednesday, Hezbollah issued the following statement. It reads: ‘The conferees reviewed all proposals in the context of trying to overcome the unjustified...
A BIG delegation of the 2,000 Chagossians who are living in Crawley, plus delegations from the FBU, GMB and POA trade unions will be picketing the House of Lords this morning from 9.30am. They will be urging the Law Lords to throw out the Brown government’s appeal against three previous...
Two hundred trade unionists and youth attended the News Line & All Trades Unions Alliance (ATUA) conference in central London, yesterday. They discussed a resolution calling for action to bring down the Brown government to keep the Tories out and go forward to a workers’ government and socialism. The resolution called...
LABOUR’s fifth place at Henley, shamefully behind the fascist BNP, will go down in history as an example of a party being thrust into the dustbin of history after 11 years of the most treacherous betrayal of its millions of supporters. All of the eleven years of Blair-Brown capitalist...
The GMB trade union yesterday expressed serious concerns over plans for a nurse-led privatised NHS contained in health minister Lord Darzi’s review, due to be published on Monday. Sharon Holder, GMB National Officer for Public Services, told News Line: ‘The GMB hopes that this will not result in a wholesale...
On International Day Against Torture last Thursday, legal charity Reprieve renewed its call for the release of torture victim Binyam Mohamed from US concentration camp Guantanamo Bay. June 26 marked the 21st anniversary of the day that the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or...
THE CBI boss Richard Lambert spoke up yesterday at the CBI Public Service Summit to insist that the financial belt-tightening that the Brown government is insisting on means that the NHS must be privatised. His message is, that in the face of the capitalist crisis, the privatisation of the NHS...
Public sector union UNISON yesterday rejected a call from the Confederation of British Industries (CBI) for ‘failing’ hospitals to be closed and replaced by privately-owned clinics. A UNISON spokeswoman told News Line: ‘We’ve said time and again that private companies do not have the answer to turning around hospitals. ‘They...
SOME 700 London Underground cleaners scheduled to strike for a living wage and basic working conditions from 6pm today have received a welcome boost from London MPs supporting their campaign. An early-day motion, tabled by John McDonnell and already signed by eight others, calls on the employers to negotiate a...
JUST a week after Prime Minister Gordon Brown assured President George W Bush, that he had fallen into line with the requirements of the United States, and that British troops would remain in Iraq until success was achieved, and agreed that there was no timetable for withdrawal, the chief...
‘We’ve had a lively picket today,’ North East London Council of Action secretary Bill Rogers told News Line outside Chase Farm Hospital in Enfield, north London, on Tuesday. The Council of Action was formed to stop the planned closure of the hospital’s A&E, Maternity and Paediatrics departments. Rogers added: ‘People have...
In this, the 60th anniversary year of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) on World Refugee Day, Amnesty International called on states to reaffirm everyone’s right to seek and to enjoy asylum free from persecution, as recognised in the words of article 14 of the UDHR. Almost two million...
Patients, staff and Enfield and district residents yesterday welcomed the mass picket of Chase Farm Hospital by the North East London Council of Action. Called to prepare to occupy the hospital to stop the closure of the A&E, Maternity and Paediatrics departments, the picket got hoots of support from...
HUGE hikes in gas and electricity bills are coming this year, the energy privateers flagrantly announced yesterday. ‘Big Six’ energy bosses told MPs on the House of Commons Business and Enterprise Select Committee that families and old age pensioners can look forward to massive £400 energy price rises over the...
THE resolution of the United Nations Security Council condemning violence in Zimbabwe, carried with both China and Russia voting for the motion, opens up the way for the imperialist powers to try to resolve the crisis of Zimbabwe in their own interests, by engineering the intervention of...
UNISON’s local government members in England, Wales and Northern Ireland have voted by 55% to 45% for a programme of sustained strike action over a 2.45% pay offer, the union announced yesterday. ‘We are proposing initially a two-day strike in July, and then we will go from there, because the...
CHANCELLOR Darling said on Sunday that pay rises for people ‘from the boardroom to the shopfloor’ need to be ‘consistent’ with the 2% inflation target. This is a mealy mouthed way of saying that pay rises must, in reality, be pay cuts of 4.2% (the official Retail Price...
‘I REFUSE to be bribed and blackmailed into silence. My struggle for justice continues’ Gordon McNeill declared last Wednesday. Discussions between the sacked Belfast airport shop stewards and representatives of the Unite union over a way of resolving the long running dispute that led last month to a hunger strike...
The British Medical Association (BMA) yesterday angrily rejected health minister Lord Darzi’s claims that they are ‘lagging behind’ and resistant to innovation to the detriment of patients. A BMA spokesperson told News Line: ‘Consultants are natural innovators and enablers in the NHS, working over and above the call of...
The oil summit in Jeddah ended in disarray yesterday with OPEC president, Algeria’s Chakib Khelil, blaming speculators for the high oil price. Leading oil producer, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah opened the meeting of producer and consumer nations by saying his country will boost output by 200,000 barrels to 9.7...
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Friday warned against the use of force on Iran, saying there was no proof it was trying to build nuclear weapons. Lavrov said Iran should be engaged in dialogue and encouraged to cooperate with the UN nuclear monitoring agency. He made the statement when...
FÎRST of all we saw the Bush-Blair attack on Iraq, whose strategic purpose was to expropriate Iraq’s oil in order to lower the world price to $10 a barrel so as to launch an American century. That attempt at plunder failed, and its consequences have been a colossal inflation in...
On Monday, 23 June, the High Court will respond to a Liberty demand for an independent investigation into the treatment of detainees at Harmondsworth Immigration Detention Centre. The court will determine whether an inquiry must be held after vulnerable detainees were locked in flooded cells without food or water while...
The National Union of Teachers (NUT) declared yesterday that the Brown government’s threat to close 638 schools for not reaching arbitrary targets ‘will be resisted’ – after the union found the closures ‘even more shocking and random than first appeared’. On June 8th, Ed Balls, Secretary of State for...
US officials yesterday admitted that a major military exercise, which saw more than 100 Israeli F-16 and F-15 fighter jets taking part in manoeuvres over the eastern Mediterranean and Greece, in the first week of June, was a practice run for a strike against...
THE UNISON National Delegate Conference in Bournemouth yesterday voted for a campaign to bring about a change to UK and EU governments’ policies towards Palestine, and to support the Hamas government in Gaza. Tony Phillips, London Fire Brigade UNISON, referring to Gaza, said: ‘1.5 million people are trapped in what...
CHANCELLOR Darling has followed up his appearance before the bankers at the Mansion House on Wednesday night, where he pledged that wage rises would be met by ever higher interest rates and unemployment, by making it crystal clear who is to gain out of this jobs and wages massacre....
Hamas and Israel on Tuesday agreed to an Egyptian-brokered deal to cease fire for six months in and around the Gaza Strip. It was effective from 6am yesterday, which was welcomed by the Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas, reports the Palestine Media Centre. ‘Both sides have pledged to halt all hostilities and...
PRIME Minister Gordon Brown and Defence Secretary Des Browne yesterday sent their condolences to the families of four more British troops killed in Afghanistan on Tuesday. This takes the total number of British forces killed, since NATO took over the occupation of the country in 2001, to 106. Brown told...
At least twice as many people die from fatal injuries at work than are victims of homicide, a new report from the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies suggests. The report, launched in parliament on Tuesday, found that at least 1,300 people died as a result of fatal occupational injuries...
BANK of England Governor Mervyn King sent a letter to Chancellor Alistair Darling yesterday because inflation has taken off. Under statutory obligations put in place when former Chancellor Gordon Brown made the bank independent of government in 1997, the Governor has to send a formal explanatory letter when inflation is...
Over 200 medical students demonstrated on the steps of University College London Hospital in central London on Monday, against the removal of free accommodation for first year junior doctors. The protesters carried placards saying ‘No room for more student debt’ and ‘Junior doctors accommodation – going, going, gone’. Victoria Nowak, BMA...
Soaring food and energy prices could push the government’s preferred consumer price index (CPI) inflation above 4% this year, the governor of the Bank of England has warned. Governor King’s warning came in his open letter to the chancellor after the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said the Consumer Prices...
PRIME MINISTER Brown showed yesterday, at his joint press conference with President Bush, that such is the historic decline and collapse of the power of British imperialism, that he cannot even equivocate, never mind say no, even to the failed outgoing president of the United States, whose two terms...
Over 200 medical students, with placards saying ‘No room for more student debt’ and ‘Junior doctors accommodation – going, going, gone’, demonstrated in central London yesterday. The protest on the steps of University College London Hospital was one of a number of lunchtime demonstrations across the country, organised by the...
TAMILNET reports that two civilians were killed on the spot last Sunday morning when the Sri Lanka Air Force (SLAF) bombed a civilian settlement of Internally Displaced Persons in Puthukkudiyiruppu in Mullaiththteevu district. Eleven civilians, including a pregnant mother, were wounded in the air attack, Tamil eelam Police said. Puthukkudiyiruppu Central...
BUSH flew into London yesterday after sending a public order to Gordon Brown, via the Observer newspaper. This was that Brown must not announce a timetable for a pull-out from Iraq. In fact, the British military are planning to announce a timetable for a final British withdrawal from...
US President George W Bush and French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Saturday jointly urged Syria to break with Iran and said that they would not let Tehran obtain nuclear weapons. ‘Iran getting a nuclear bomb is unacceptable, that’s clear. It’s an unacceptable threat,’ Sarkozy said, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Bush...
‘BRING Binyam home! Close Guantanamo Bay!’ chanted over 100 demonstrators at Trafalgar Square yesterday afternoon, before the arrival of US President George W. Bush at Downing Street. Clive Stafford-Smith of Reprieve said: ‘For reasons best known to themselves, the British government has invited George Bush to Britain today. ‘At the very...
Formal talks between Unite trade union officials and Shell suppliers are due to resume today, as hundreds of petrol stations have begun closing. Informal talks to resolve the tanker drivers’ dispute had been continuing over the weekend but with no resolution. The 641 drivers working for Shell’s two supply contractors, Hoyer...
Over 400 family doctor delegates at the British Medical Association (BMA) GPs conference on Thursday expressed their anger and voted no confidence in the government’s stewardship of the NHS, and over Brown, Johnson and Darzi’s privatisation drive. At the Local Medical Committees (LMCs) Conference in central London, doctors applauded their...
THE latest attempt to advance, by sleight of hand, to a united capitalist state of the European Union for the benefit of the continent’s bosses and bankers has failed, after the Irish workers voted no and threw the Lisbon treaty into the dustbin of history. This reveals that such...