Monthly Archives: June 2008
Pickets were out at twelve fuel depots from 6am yesterday as over 600 Shell tanker drivers empl-oyed by two companies, Hoyer UK and Suckling Transport, began a four-day strike over pay. Strikers, members of Unite trade union, held placards reading ‘Shell profits gush’ and ‘Drivers’ pay trickles’. Talks aimed at averting...
Pickets were out in force at the Science Museum in west London yesterday. Public and Commercial Services (PCS) members joined colleagues from the Prospect trade union, in a second one day strike over the imposition of a below-inflation pay offer for 2007/08 and 2008/09. Staff working for the National Museum of...
Legal charity Reprieve has released its report, ‘Human Cargo’, which details the rendition and torture of Binyam Mohamed, a British resident in Guantánamo Bay. Reprieve is calling for a full and open US congressional investigation into the crimes that have been committed against Mohamed. The charity is demanding that the US...
FAMILY doctors yesterday expressed their furious opposition to privately-run polyclinics and voted to take ‘unprecedented action’ in response to ‘unprecedented political threats to general practice’. GPs voted unanimously for Motion 32 at the British Medical Association (BMA) Local Medical Committees (LMCs) annual conference in central London, which supported the BMA’s...
PRIME Minister Brown’s alliance with the right-wing Democratic Unionist Party has paid off with the passage by nine votes of his amendment to the terror laws allowing the police to hold a ‘terror suspect’ for up to 42 days without having to charge them with any crime. The fact is,...
‘IGNORE at your peril the wishes of the most important people in the NHS – the patients,’ British Medical Association (BMA) GPs Committee chairman Dr Laurence Buckman is warning prime minister Brown today. In his keynote speech to the BMA Local Medical Committees (LMCs) GPs’ conference this morning, Dr...
ISRAEL on Wednesday said it backed Egyptian efforts to mediate a truce with Hamas in and around Gaza but also at the same time ordered its military to prepare for a possible offensive into the Palestinian territory to ‘give Hamas a good thrashing’. The Israeli Prime Minister’s spokesman Mark Regev...
Over 2,000 Tamils demonstrated outside the Commonwealth Conference in central London on Tuesday against the attendance of Sri Lanka president Mahinda Rajapakse. Their banners carried a clear message ‘Go Home Warmonger’, ‘Suspend Sri Lanka from the Commonwealth’, and ‘Sri Lanka is a Terrorist State’. The demonstration was organised by the Tamil...
SIX HUNDRED Shell tanker drivers are to take four-day strike action from 6am on Friday, fighting for a £2,000 pay rise and a minimum wage of £36,000. The drivers work for two transport firms – Hoyer UK and Suckling Transport – sub-contractors for Shell which, according to the Brown government,...
‘We want freedom! We want Tamil Eelam! Stop the genocide’ shouted 2,000 Tamils demonstrating in central London yesterday. The protest outside the Commonwealth Conference taking place in Pall Mall, was organised by the Tamil community in Britain against the attendance of Sri Lanka president Mahinda Rajapakse. The demonstrators had huge banners...
IN the last few weeks we have seen the road hauliers take to the streets against the massive increases in petrol and diesel prices that are putting their family businesses into bankruptcy. They were unable to get any pledge or promise from the Labour government that it would lower the...
COLLEGE lecturers across London staged their second strike against the government’s pay-cutting strategy on Monday, June 9th, after taking part in national strike action alongside teachers and civil servants on April 24. The lecturers, represented by the UCU trade union, were joined this time by Museum of London staff, represented...
TODAY the British ruling class is in mourning for the 100 British soldiers that they have sent to their deaths in Afghanistan, no mind the thousands that have been wounded. Forgotten are the over 10,000 Afghans that have been killed in the fighting bravely defending their country from the imperialist...
Hamas and Fatah failed to reach a breakthrough in reconciliation talks held in Senegal, a top Hamas official said on Sunday. Representatives from the two sides met separately with Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade in Dakar to try and resolve the dispute. Osama Hamdan, Hamas’ representative in Lebanon, told Al-Jazeera Channel that...
GIVE us a date for strike action and we’ll do it, the leader of the Prison Officers Association (POA) – whose members are banned from striking – told hundreds of trade unionists at the TUC Public Services Rally yesterday. Caton received a standing ovation at the rally against privatisation and...
By JOHN COULTER Irish political journalist THE sectarian war in Ireland is over, but the war on racism has begun. That was the pledge from Sinn Fein’s newly re-elected deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness as a new post Paisley era in the Northern peace process got underway. And he also warned the...
Hundreds of so-called ‘failing’ schools are to be told to ‘improve’ within three years or face closure. Alternatively they may be merged or turned into privately-run academies, under the latest government edict. ‘This government should improve or be closed down, their performance is a lot worse than any of the...
THE House of Commons votes on Wednesday on extending the amount of time that the police can hold a ‘terrorist suspect’ without charging them from 28 to 42 days. Even reactionaries like Lord Goldsmith, who eventually gave the advice to the British government that it would be legal to invade...
By John Coulter, Irish Political Journalist Retiring First Minister and hell fire fundamentalist preacher Rev Ian Paisley has been hailed as a political Caesar – by Sinn Fein President and West Belfast MP Gerry Adams. Adams made his remarks as Paisley senior formally stepped down as the North’s First Minister after...
COLLEGE lecturers in London, members of the University and College Union (UCU), will take strike action on Monday (9 June). And further action across England may follow in September if employers don’t improve their latest pay offer, the union warned yesterday. The London lecturers will join a TUC lobby of MPs...
THE UNISON leaders who originally accepted the three year sub-inflation pay deal for NHS workers, along with the RCN, without going to ballot, yesterday just about managed to hold the line for the Brown government, in a ballot that was forced onto them by a decision of the union’s...
YESTERDAY Hillary Clinton revealed that she will formally end her campaign for the White House on Saturday, and throw her full support behind her Democratic rival Barack Obama. She said in a letter: ‘I have said throughout the campaign that I would strongly support Senator Obama if he were the...
The British Medical Association (BMA) Consultants Conference in London on Wednesday voted to reject NHS privatisation and to call on the BMA to launch a campaign to defend District General Hospitals. In his keynote speech, to the 150-strong conference, the chairman of the BMA consultants committee, Dr Jonathan Fielden...
Keele University has one week to avoid the ignominy of becoming the first university to receive an academic boycott from the University and College union (UCU), the union warned yesterday. The UCU said that unless the university halts its attempts to make 38 academic staff compulsorily redundant and halts the...
THE announcement by the Brown government that it is going to bring private managers in to run NHS hospitals is a concrete example of how the capitalist crisis is driving the Brown government to the right, to further measures of privatisation, and to carry out all of the policies...
As Israel steps up its human rights violations and systematic breaches of international humanitarian law in the Gaza Strip, all the basic functions of civilian life have come to a near standstill, including drinking water delivery, sewage water disposal, and garbage collection. So reported the Palestine Return Centre (PRC)...
‘WE will not let this government privatise the NHS,’ declared British Medical Association Consultants Committee Chairman Jonathan Fielden yesterday. In his keynote address to the 150 strong BMA consultants conference, Fielden said that on the 60th anniversary of the NHS ‘can we really trust our political leaders to ensure the...
A BRITISH Court yesterday ordered an expedited hearing on whether the British government can ignore the plea by London man Binyam Mohamed for evidence that could help prove his innocence in a Guantánamo Bay Military Commission, and his years of torture. On June 3 2008, the Pentagon finally announced that...
By John Coulter, Irish Political Journalist ANOTHER Stormont crisis looms in the North, but is this latest ‘storm’ merely clever sabre rattling or the warning bells for meltdown? Newly installed Democratic Unionist Party chief Peter Robinson could lose up to 15 Assembly seats if Sinn Fein’s bluff is called and Northern...
‘BLOCKADE the Ports’ was the cry that went up from up to 300 fishermen, at the outcome of their meeting yesterday with Jonathan Shaw, Minister for Marine and Fisheries. They were demanding urgent government measures to compensate for the soaring cost of fuel. Many face ruin in the coming weeks...
THE talk by the commander of the British forces in Afghanistan, Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith, that ‘missions by special forces and air strikes by unmanned drones have “decapitated” the Taleban and brought the war in Afghanistan to a “tipping point”’ is an example of the kind of self-delusion that fuelled...
AT a time when the working class is starting to roar like a lion and demand and vote by over 90 per cent majorities for industrial action to smash Brown’s three-year wage cutting deals, the trade union bureaucracy are acting like lambs. They are seeking to sustain the Brown...
The Lebanese detainee in Israeli jails for the past six years was released Sunday morning from the Nitzan (Ramle) Prison in Ramallah, in the framework of a swap deal between Hezbollah and Israel, reported Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV. Hezbollah senior official, Hajj Wafiq Safa, announced that Hezbollah has handed the ICRC...
‘The US government must reveal information about prison ships used for “terror suspects”,’ the legal action charity, Reprieve said yesterday. In June 2005 the UN’s special rapporteur on terrorism spoke of ‘very, very serious’ allegations that the United States was secretly detaining terrorism suspects in various locations around the world,...
Amnesty International UK yesterday welcomed a further statement by Labour’s former Attorney General, Goldsmith, opposing plans to extend detention without charge to 42 days. Amnesty spokesperson Neil Durkin said: ‘Lord Goldsmith is right to say that extending the already overlong pre-charge detention periods in this country would damage our...
CITIGROUP bank has warned the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) against upping interest rates when it meets this week. It noted that already a quarter of a million UK homeowners are in negative equity. The US banking giant said house prices had slipped back by seven per cent since...
ON Saturday June 29, the News Line daily newspaper will be having a joint conference with the All Trades Unions Alliance, the body that is the industrial arm of the Workers Revolutionary Party. (See add page 1) Already great interest and support are being expressed in and for this conference...
Guantanamo is a really horrible place that destroys people,’ former prisoner Bisher El-Rawi told a 60-strong meeting in west London on Saturday. The meeting, organised by the London Guantanamo Campaign, was to highlight the plight of Binyam Mohamed who now faces trial at a US military tribunal on terror charges...