Monthly Archives: August 2009

Post workers were out on strike again on Saturday in defence of their jobs, working conditions, pensions and pay. The Communication Workers Union branded Royal Mail’s business approach ‘chaos management’. Thousands of postal workers from Bristol, Cambridge, Edinburgh, London, Middlesbrough and other offices have been striking as Royal Mail continues pushing...

WITH ten British troops killed in Helmand province so that just hundreds of people could vote – and after five per cent turned out to vote in Southern Afghanistan, while the election in the non-Pashtun areas in the north of the country was completely rigged and known to be...

Postmen and women were out in force on picket lines at 5.30am on Saturday all over London discussing the progress of their dispute against Royal Mail and the Labour government. At Acton in west London, CWU rep Mitch Mitchell said: ‘This is the ninth day we’ve been out since the...

California health workers have given the giant Kaiser health corporation notice of strike action over 1,300 job cuts. Trade unionists from Service Employees International Union (SEIU) United Healthcare Workers-West said: ‘Two locations, two crowds, one message: SEIU-UHW members will resist all attempts by Kaiser management to force us or our...

UK Gross Domestic Product fell in the three months from April to June by 0.7% confirming that the slump is deepening and that the ‘recession’ is far from over. The year-on-year collapse in production was 5.5%, the biggest fall since records began. The previous quarter saw a huge 2.4% contraction of...

‘THE new cap on local housing allowance goes against the government’s whole rationale for introducing it,’ Child Poverty Action Group Chief Executive Kate Green said yesterday. ‘It is disgraceful to claw back £150 million from the poorest households when ministers are too timid to put a fair cap on multi-million...

‘ONE million NHS patients have been the victims of appalling care in hospitals across Britain, according to a major report,’ screamed the capitalist press yesterday, adding that ‘bad cruel nurses’ were responsible for the neglect and degradation of patients. With these words, the campaign begun in the US by the...

Dr Khudayr al-Murshidi, official representative of the Iraqi Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party, has warned that the United States is seeking to divide the resistance movement in Iraq. Speaking in the Syrian capital Damascus last weekend, the Iraqi Ba’athist leader declared: ‘Iraq is still under American occupation, there are 140,000 American...

‘The mood is defiant,’ said striking postal workers in Cambridge yesterday. This came as the Communication Workers Union branded Royal Mail’s business approach ‘chaos management’. Thousands of postal workers from Bristol, Cambridge, Edinburgh, London, Middlesbrough and other offices are striking as Royal Mail continues pushing through panic cuts with ‘an aggressive...

General Motors is considering keeping GM Europe rather than selling it. This came after the German government pressed for Canadian auto parts maker Magna, backed by Russian state-owned lender Sberbank, while GM executives favour RHJ International to take over the GM European arm, which includes Germany’s Opel and the UK’s...

The US government is heading for a massive $10 trillion budget deficit over the next decade, analysts warned yesterday after the White House projected the deficit would be $2 trillion higher over the period than its February estimate. This news came as President Obama announced his intention to reappoint Ben...

PALESTINIANS are once again being threatened with a dirty deal after the Netanyahu-Brown meeting in London. After a Brown declaration that Britain is Israel’s ‘true friend’, Netanyahu agreed that Israel would not begin any new settlements in the West Bank, but insisted on the right for the existing Israeli settlements...

‘It is a beautiful day on the picket line and we have a really energetic group of Young Socialists members who have come to support us,’ Bill Rogers, secretary of the North-East London Council of Action, said on Tuesday. He was speaking at the monthly North-East London Council of Action...

THE Detroit board of US carmaker General Motors last Friday postponed making a decision on who should acquire its Opel division, including the two GM plants in the UK. The Detroit gang favours the RHJ venture capitalist group, who say that they are going to sack over 10,000, organise wage...

Israel knew about ‘80,000 missiles’ in the possession of Hezbollah,’ President Shimon Peres said in comments published Saturday. In an interview with the Kuwaiti al-Rai newspaper, Peres cast doubt on ‘Hezbollah’s goals and the justifications for its presence.’ ‘Hezbollah is working for its own interests and will always find a pretext...

POLICE yesterday arrested several protestors who were laying siege to Downing Street, demonstrating against the visit of ‘war criminal’ Binyamin Netanyahu. They were also demanding the dismantling of all Zionist settlements in occupied Palestine. More than 300 demonstrators refused to confine their protest at the visit of the Israeli prime minister...

SUPPORT for occupation was rock solid at the monthly North-East London Council of Action picket of Chase Farm Hospital, which was joined by over 50 people throughout the day. Diana Antwi, a nurse at Chase Farm and RCN member, said: ‘It’s a really bad idea to discontinue the A&E and...

No national elections will be held without a unity agreement between Hamas and Fatah and the release of political prisoners from West Bank jails, Hamas spokesperson Fawzi Barhoum said on Friday. No progress on unity was reportedly achieved by the latest Egyptian delegation to tour Ramallah and Damascus. Barhoum called the...

THE Putin regime has been hit hard by the world capitalist crisis, especially by the fall in oil prices, and the effect that the world slump has had on the export of other raw materials, and minerals that the Russian Federation is especially rich in. Putin has seen the Oligarchs,...

Almost 8,000 firefighters in England, almost one in five, will be taking some form of industrial action from tomorrow, in a series of regional disputes. Action short of a strike, including an overtime ban, is already taking place in South Yorkshire, Humberside and London with Essex set to follow tomorrow. London...

Stoke-on-Trent Mail Centre delivery staff walked out on unofficial strike for the third time yesterday after being ordered by management to cross their processing and distribution staff’s picket lines or be taken off pay. Stoke Communication Workers’ Union (CWU) Area Processing Rep. Mick Brennan told News Line: ‘We are still...

LONDON GPs have complained that £1.43 million has been cut from their commissioning budgets for 2009/10 while £1.4 million is paid for a centrally set contract with private contractor Clinicenta, the British Medical Association house magazine, BMA News, has reported. The doctors are also angry that NHS Islington will spend...

With just five weeks until the German elections, Chancellor Merkel yesterday expressed her anger and frustration at the failure last Friday of General Motors and the US authorities to choose a candidate to take over GM Europe. Merkel called for a decision to be taken urgently and preferably as soon...

YESTERDAY the bourgeois media were demanding to know ‘exactly why this killer was freed’, calling Abdelbaset Ali al Megrahi a ‘despicable mass murderer’. The news outlets tried to give short shrift to those who argued that the release was an act of mercy to a dying...

THE Scottish Nationalist government has defended its decision to release Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi amid a mounting and frenzied counter-attack directed by the Obama administration. Scotland's former Labour first minister Jack McConnell has joined the attack saying that it was a ‘grave error of judgment’. Saif al-Islam...

A WEEK ago the Chairman of the Bank of England, King, suggested that those who said they were seeing the ‘green shoots of recovery’ were hallucinating. In fact, the minutes of the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee show that King was part of a three-man minority that wanted to...

Patient care in West Yorkshire will be under threat if plans for swingeing cuts to the blood service in Leeds go ahead, the Unite union warned yesterday. Unite has asked the National Blood Service (NBS) to rescind plans to axe 45 staff in donor testing and records in November, with...

WORKERS at GMM Luton yesterday condemned the refusal of their union leaders to fight, as they waited the outcome of the General Motors board meeting in Detroit. The GM board was discussing the sale of GM Europe unit, which includes Germany’s Opel and the UK’s GM plants. Last Sunday GMM...

‘This is an important fight, it will define the future of our members, whether we stay full or part time, or even employed at all’ Camberwell Communication Workers’ Union (CWU) Deputy Unit Rep Adam Gebbett told News Line at a 150-strong South East London CWU strike rally on Wednesday. He...

THE German government yesterday made its move to try and secure GM Europe for Magna, the Canadian car parts manufacturer that wants to sack 10,000 GM Europe workers, cut wages and shut down a number of plants. Magna is in partnership with the Russian state owned Sberbank, whose...

Germany yesterday upped the pressure on US car giant General Motors to sell GM Europe, which includes Germany’s Opel and the UK’s Vauxhall, to Berlin’s preferred bidder, Magna. Chancellor Angela Merkel wants GM to choose an offer from the Canadian parts maker, which is backed by the state-owned Russian bank,...

The British Medical Association (BMA) yesterday condemned moves to allow a private company to take over the running of Hinchingbrooke NHS hospital in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire. A BMA spokesperson said: ‘This is yet another example of the continuing drive for competition, private provision, and commercialisation, which remains a major threat...

The ongoing Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip, now in its third year, has triggered a ‘protracted human dignity crisis’ with devastating humanitarian consequences, according to a new report released on Monday by the United Nations relief wing. Entitled ‘Locked In: The Humanitarian Impact of Two Years of Blockade on...

WHEN the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) decided two weeks ago to print £50 billion more for its stimulus programme binge, the City, which was basking in the news that the ‘green shoots of recovery had been sighted’, reacted as if a tub of ice-cold water had been poured over...

POSTAL workers were out on strike throughout London yesterday, while Royal Mail drivers were also out in Essex and the Midlands; and Stoke on Trent postal workers were continuing with their indefinite strike action. Pickets at Southwark, south London, Delivery Office were determined to fight against the casualisation of the...

Legal charity Reprieve on Monday warned the Brown government that it is suing it to obtain the necessary information in order to identify two men who have been held without charge in the notorious US-run Bagram prison camp in Afghanistan since June 2004. Reprieve has accused the UK government of...

RECORD numbers of young people, 835,000 18-24 year-olds, are not in school, college or work in England, official figures are showing. This is an increase of 105,000 over the figure of 730,000 recorded for the same quarter last year. Already the propagandists of the bourgeoisie and their politicians such as Chancellor...

‘We’re still on continuous strike until we get a sensible resolution and restore the correct adoption of the Managing the Surplus Framework Agreement,’ Stoke-on-Trent Communication Workers Union (CWU) Area Processing Rep Mick Brennan told News Line yesterday. ‘We’re very angry. There’s over 100 workers involved in the strike in defence...

HASSAN Nasrallah, secretary general of Lebanon’s Hezbollah, has spoken at a ceremony marking the third anniversary of the July 2006 war with Israel. Speaking in Beirut’s Southern Suburb, he said: ‘Brothers and sisters we are talking about a historic epic that was forged by Lebanon and the people of...

1381 was the historic year when the peasantry rose up against the imposition of the Poll Tax in a revolt that speeded up the process of the complete undermining of feudal society. This began when the Black Death of 1348 wiped out one third of the population, and led to...

‘These two men have been held in appalling conditions for five years, and for all that time the British government chose to do nothing,’ legal charity Reprieve’s director Clive Stafford Smith told a news conference at Westminster yesterday. He was announcing litigation against the British government over the alleged cover-up...

‘Any further increase in university fees will be about as popular as the poll tax,’ says University and College Union (UCU) general secretary Sally Hunt, as student debt rises yet again. The UCU warns today that people are being ‘priced out’ of going to university, after new research revealed that...

During Israel’s recent Gaza offensive, Israeli soldiers unlawfully shot and killed eleven Palestinian civilians, including five women and four children, who were in groups waving white flags to convey their civilian status, Human Rights Watch states in a report released last Thursday. The Israeli military should conduct thorough, credible investigations...

THE deaths of two more British soldiers, blown up by IEDs in Afghanistan, has brought the total number of British troops killed in Afghanistan to 201, since the Anglo-American invasion in September 2001. While this figure is just a drop in the ocean compared to the tens of thousands...

Despite Tory leader Cameron’s protestations that he supports the NHS, it emerged yesterday that several leading Tory shadow cabinet members put their names to a manifesto calling for the NHS to be dismantled. These include close Cameron ally, shadow education spokesman Michael Gove. The Tory leaders are listed alongside MEP...