Monthly Archives: July 2008
‘THERE is a real sense in markets today of the economy falling off a cliff.’ That was the verdict of Michael Saunders, the chief economist of the world’s largest bank, Citigroup, on financial and economic events on Tuesday. George Soros, the financial speculator who made billions two decades ago in...
The Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, has praised the position of the Libyan leader, Colonel Muammar Gadaffi, who refused to attend the Paris summit to declare the Union for the Mediterranean. Hamas said that this is an advanced position that understands the core message of this gathering as an attempt to...
TODAY 800,000 local council workers, members of the UNISON and UNITE trade unions, begin a two-day strike against a government-imposed wage cut, an offer of 2.45% outstripped by inflation. UNISON said: ‘With everyday essentials like food and petrol going up, as well as gas and electricity bills, our members cannot...
PEOPLE from Africa, eastern Europe and other parts of the world seeking refuge in Britain are being subjected to ‘horrific violence’ and abuse in detention and even on planes chartered to deport them, it is being alleged. A report entitled, ‘Outsourcing abuse: The use and misuse of state-sanctioned force during...
HUNDREDS of angry workers, patients, trade unionists and youth joined the mass picket of Chase Farm Hospital in Enfield yesterday. They all said they were determined that the much-needed District General Hospital which is threatened with closure will be kept open. Sue Fitzgerald, Chase Farm midwife said: ‘I think we should...
OVER 800,000 Unite and UNISON council workers in England, Wales and the north of Ireland are taking strike action today and tomorrow, furious at the employers’ pay-cutting offer of 2.45%. Public sector union UNISON said yesterday it is expecting a huge turnout, with social workers, librarians, school meals workers, refuse...
PEOPLE who have fled to Britain, seeking help and refuge, are suffering horrifying violence at the hands of the British state, it was alleged yesterday. ‘Outsourcing Abuse’, a report detailing allegations of hundreds of assaults, was launched yesterday at a London press conference where independent doctors, lawyers and former detainees...
PREMIER BROWN told his monthly news briefing yesterday of the war that he is waging on the country’s youth and the 110,000 ‘problem families’ who are to be ‘targeted’ and whom, he asserted, are rearing ‘disruptive youngsters’. The problem families would be given parenting support, a parenting contract and supervision....
Orangefest’s family fun dissolved into political Orange fury as demonstration speakers blasted homosexuals, the Irish language and even called for volunteers to execute criminals using the electric chair, Political Journalist JOHN COULTER reports. Fry criminals in the electric chair – that was the message the Orange Order sent out from...
LIBYAN leader Muammar Gadaffi has strongly criticised Nicolas Sarkozy’s proposed Mediterranean union project, and rejected it as a ‘Crusaders’ containment of the Islamic land, a European neo-colonialism’. In a 55-minute speech delivered last Wednesday in Tripoli, Gadaffi began by saying he welcomed cooperation with Europe, Africa and the Mediterranean...
THE North-East London Council of Action yesterday called on everyone opposed to the threatened closure of Chase Farm Hospital’s Accident and Emergency department and maternity and children’s services to march through Enfield on July 26 and be prepared to occupy the hospital to stop it closing. ASLEF train drivers’...
The Fire Brigades Union (FBU) yesterday expressed ‘deep concern’ over secret plans to hire Group 4 private strike breakers in a £100m contract. A FBU spokesman told News Line: ‘On Friday, representatives from 33 fire and rescue services in England and Wales met in London. ‘Disputes in the fire service are...
THE capitalist state has had to admit that its war on two fronts means that it cannot rely on the British army for strike breaking at home against workers who play a strategic role in the capitalist economy, such as the firefighters and the petrol tanker drivers. This is a...
THE heads of the Federal Reserve and the US Treasury have been forced to try to calm fears that the nation’s two largest mortgage firms, Fannie May and Freddie Mac are going bust, and that the US housing market faces total collapse. Shares in both companies hit 17-year lows on...
AROUND 100 members of the Fire Brigades Union from across London lobbied talks at ACAS yesterday, where FBU leaders warned the employers they would call a strike ballot, unless a £2,500 a year pay cut for ‘watch managers’ is withdrawn. Derek Warman, FBU borough rep for Merton and Sutton, told...
‘It is appalling that this Labour government is now more obsessed with selling off our public services to put profits in the pockets of millionaires, than caring about the lives of the millions of people who rely on those services.’ So said Public and Commercial Services union (PCS) general secretary...
MORE than 100 people staged a mass lobby of Southwark Town Hall in south London on Wednesday night. The rain did not dampen their spirits, as they vowed to fight to defend council housing and all services in Southwark. More than 20 members of the South-East London Council of Action lobbied...
THE reaction of the Brown government to the eruption of the capitalist crisis has been to champion the interests of the banks, pledging to them unlimited state aid, which has already reached over £150 billion, without requiring the banks to provide collateral for the ‘loans’ or gifts. At the same...
The Independent Asylum Commission on Thursday recommended that the UK conducts a ‘root and branch review’ of its detention policies, and that it should stop detaining the children of asylum seekers entirely. The recommendations came as the Commission published its final report, Deserving Dignity which is its third report of...
A RUSSIAN foreign ministry statement issued on Tuesday evening said: ‘If a US strategic anti-missile shield starts to be deployed near our borders, we will be forced to react not in a diplomatic fashion but with military-technical means.’ This was Russia’s response to Tuesday’s signing by the US and...
THE BMA’s Annual Representative Meeting (ARM) on Wednesday morning narrowly voted against part five of motion 269, which ‘demands that the government must permit co-payment for treatment in the UK health service’. Co-payments would allow patients to ‘top-up’ their NHS care by paying for additional treatments themselves. The motion from Northern...
THE British Medical Association yesterday criticised NHS employers for refusing to enter into talks over the loss of hospital accommodation support. From August 2008, junior doctors will no longer be entitled to free hospital accommodation in their first year after leaving medical school. This policy change, which will cost many an...
THE British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) quarterly report has just discovered a situation that every worker and every shopper has been acquainted with for months. This is the situation where prices of the most basic commodities are rising savagely, where banks, the service industries and what is left of manufacturing...
DOCTORS’ anger at the drive to privatise the NHS dominated the British Medical Association’s Annual Representative Meeting in Edinburgh this week. Delegates voted overwhelmingly for motions to stop the privatisation, including Motion 39, which states: ‘The private sector should have no role in the commissioning of public services.’ Moving the motion,...
DOCTORS at the Annual Representative Meeting of the British Medical Association in Edinburgh yesterday voted to stop the privatisation of the NHS, and voted against privately run polyclinics, and health minister Lord Darzi’s plan for London. Motion 33 from the Agenda Committee states that ‘this government’s health care reforms...
Prime Minister Gordon Brown yesterday gave a fitting reply to all those trade union bureaucrats who were saying that he could be forced to ditch his Thatcherite policies now that the Labour party is financially bankrupt. Brown simply told the union leaders that ‘there will be no return to the...
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has just released thousands of pages of documents related to Navy investigations of civilians killed by Coalition Forces in Iraq, including the cousin of the Iraqi ambassador to the United States. Released in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by the...
THE fact that the Civil Contingencies Committee (COBRA) is in session over the implications of the fuel crisis, and more specifically, that the crisis will lead to a major action of the road hauliers that will rapidly bring about a food crisis, and even food rationing, is...
REVOLUTION is brewing, in the most unlikely of places, as staff walked out last Friday from the British Museum’s cultured halls to strike. Determined to secure a living wage and respect from the museum’s management, the museum’s workers joined forces and brought their leaders and unions out. Both the...
DOCTORS will be challenging the government’s privatisation of the NHS at the British Medical Association’s Annual Representative Meeting in Edinburgh, which starts today. On this 60th anniversary of the National Health Service, our health service has never been under a greater threat. Last week, health minister Lord Darzi’s NHS Stage Review...
TEXAS PACIFIC GROUP’S decision to cut and run, taking with it the £179 million that was to be used to buy 23 per cent of the ailing Bradford and Bingley Bank, at 55p a share, is the proof that today every bank is a Northern Rock Bank just waiting...
By John Coulter, Irish Political Journalist Where are the loyalist arsenals of death? That’s one of the key questions the proposed new Stormont department for policing and justice will face. 2006 marked the 20th anniversary of the formation of the loyalist terror group, Ulster Resistance, but it again raises the spectre...
‘Kick ancient pay out of our museum’ said placards carried by 300 British Museum staff out yesterday against what amounts to a public sector pay freeze instigated (behind the scenes) by a Labour Government. Both Prospect and Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) members united in a determined stance against...
UNISON, the UK’s largest public sector union, yesterday raised concerns over the consequences of introducing individual budgets outlined in yesterday’s ‘Primary and Community Care’ report. Karen Jennings, UNISON Head of Health said: ‘We believe that patients should have a greater say in their treatment and greater access to information about...
TAMILNET reports that Sri Lanka Army chief Lt. Gen. Sarath Fonseka this week again revised his timetable for defeating the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam; to mid-2009, from an earlier estimate of June 2008. Saying that the LTTE had lost its conventional fighting capacity, he told international correspondents on...
THE scale of the military and economic beating that the US-UK imperialists have taken, as a result of their disastrous military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, can be gauged by the fact that the current head of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, says that...
Over 900 road hauliers and independent truckers, descended on Parliament yesterday to lobby their MPs to urgently and immediately reduce the price of fuel. Frustration was building up as truckers parked up on the A40, 600 lorries strong, and made their way to Westminster, to press their demands. They...
HUNDREDS of hauliers picketed parliament in London yesterday to demonstrate against the rising cost of fuel, and the way that it is destroying their jobs and small businesses. They were demanding a 25p-in-the-pound tax rebate on diesel. Their verdict on the situation was that they ‘had had enough’ and that...
KING Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, whose nation is the world’s number one oil exporter, called on consumer countries to get used to high prices in comments published on Tuesday. ‘Consumer countries have to adapt to the prices and the mechanisms of the market,’ the king said. He added: ‘We have...
over 150 Chagos Islanders, British trade unionists and youth held a mass picket outside the House of Lords on Monday. The picket was called to lobby the hearing of the British government’s appeal against two High Court rulings that the Islanders have the right to return to two of the...