Monthly Archives: September 2009
YESTERDAY afternoon the PM’s office was leaking the speech that Brown is due to give to the TUC Congress on Tuesday. It stressed that if the trade unions refuse to accept the big cuts the Labour government intends to make, they will have the Tories back, who will make even...
PRIME Minister Gordon Brown laid down the gauntlet at the weekend to this week’s TUC Congress, being held in Liverpool. Downing Street has released excerpts of Brown’s speech to the Congress tomorrow, the essence of which is – if the trade unions won’t accept his cuts policy, then they will...
Legal charity Reprieve has called on the British government to make up for failing Naheem Hussain and Rehan Zaman by intervening immediately to prevent the use of ‘torture evidence’ at their trial. A Reprieve statement said: ‘Naheem and Rehan were arrested in June 2004 in Pakistan and were subjected to...
TRADE unions and children’s charities have denounced calls from the Taxpayers Alliance and the Institute of Directors for the abolition of child benefit. The right-wing groups issued a joint report yesterday called: ‘How to save £50 billion’, which contained 34 proposals including the freezing of pensions and public sector pay,...
THE Prime Minister met 15 trade union leaders at Chequers yesterday. This was an event in itself, since all the earlier Blair-Brown governments had said that the days of TUC leaders meeting the Prime Minister were over. With a general election approaching, in the middle of a massive economic and...
Prime Minister Brown met 15 union leaders at his country residence Chequers for three hours yesterday afternoon, to discuss spending cuts ahead of next week’s TUC Congress in Liverpool. Ahead of the meeting Downing Street issued a statement saying the meeting would be ‘no love-in’. ‘The purpose is to discuss...
The Communication Workers Union (CWU) has been in ‘intermittent’ talks with Royal Mail for weeks, CWU London Regional Secretary John Denton confirmed to News Line yesterday. He said the latest talks ‘began last week’. Denton explained: ‘Up to now Royal Mail had been saying they are going to do as they...
TamilNet has commented on the British Television Channel 4 programme on Monday which revealed a new film that showed Tamil ‘victims of Sri Lanka’s war suffering poor conditions in UN-funded camps’. The new footage, allegedly taken on a mobile phone, was sent to Channel 4 from the group War Without...
THE Unite trade union leadership has reacted to the news that GM has handed over GM Europe to Magna, in a deal bankrolled by the German government, by urging that any pain resulting from the sale must be shared throughout the EU. The union accepted that there will be redundancies...
GERMAN Chancellor Angela Merkel was first to announce yesterday that General Motors (GM) has chosen Canadian auto parts manufacturer Magna to buy Opel and sister firm Vauxhall. Magna has pledged to keep all German plants open, although it has made it clear it will axe 10,000 jobs out of 54,500...
CWU members are standing fast at Royal Mail delivery offices across London, in their fight to defend jobs and basic trade union rights. Strike action again took place at local delivery offices across the capital yesterday, ahead of the ballot of all CWU members at Royal Mail for a national...
ISRAEL’S military onslaught on Gaza, where it not only used massive bombs and missiles but banned cluster bombs and white phosphorus weapons, killed 1,387 Palestinians, including 320 children, who took no part in any of the fighting. Blocks of apartments, UN schools and hospitals were shelled and their inhabitants...
Over 80 sacked Visteon workers, Visteon retirees and a delegation of sacked Gate Gourmet workers lobbied the Unite union head office in Holborn, central London yesterday. The Visteon workers and retirees are calling for their union leaders to take action to restore their pensions in full. The sacked Gate Gourmet workers...
A Joint statement by the European Employee Forum of General Motors (EEF), the European Metalworkers‚ Federation (EMF) and the European Unions was issued yesterday on the current meeting of the GM Board of Directors. They are deeply concerned that GM’s strategy regarding the sale of Opel may lead all...
THE price of gold has touched $1,000 an ounce for the first time in six months, more than three times greater than what it was when the then Chancellor Brown sold off almost half of Britain’s gold reserves, saying they were just an out of date symbol. Brown went on...
Three months before the US invasion of Iraq, France was considering protecting senior figures from President Saddam Hussein’s government, according to a senior intelligence officer’s notes published last Monday. Extracts taken from the private diaries of General Philippe Rondot, a former adviser on intelligence and special operations in President Jacques...
THE Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has declared that he is ready to talk to President Obama and other leaders and have a ‘fair, logical’ dialogue to solve today’s challenges. Iran clearly wants a compromise and pledged that while it ruled out any discussion of its ‘undeniable’ right to nuclear energy,...
TamilNet reports that Dr Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu has condemned an anonymous death threat and his detension in the airport by the Terrorist Investigation Division (TID) – an arm of the Sri Lankan State – as both constituting ‘a chilling illustration of the potential costs and likely consequences of daring to...
Unemployed construction workers were joined by young apprentices unable to complete their training because of a lack of work, in a mass protest at Uskmouth, near Newport in South Wales, yesterday. Hundreds took part in the protest outside the construction site for a gas-fired power station, after text messages were...
Netanyahu’s planned approval of the construction of new homes for settlers in the West Bank is ‘unacceptable’, President Mahmoud Abbas said on Friday in Paris. ‘What the Israeli government said (about the planned construction) is not useful. It is unacceptable for us. We want a freeze on all settlement...
LONDON MIDLAND drivers have refused to work voluntary overtime on Sundays after the company cut their pay for the day to single time. The rail company is trying to make use of the current economic climate to cut the drivers’ wages and is prepared to see thousands of Sunday passengers...
THE BNP, a fascist movement, is to be promoted by the BBC with an invitation about to be sent to it to appear on ‘Question Time’, and invitations being considered for other programmes. The BBC statement coincided with the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War in...
General Motors is expected to make a ‘fundamental decision’ this week about selling GM Europe, which includes Germany’s Opel and the UK’s Vauxhall, threatening the jobs of 5,000 UK and 10,000 German workers. The GM Board has been in talks for weeks about whether to sell the units to Russian...
Striking lecturers at Tower Hamlets College in East London yesterday called on other trade unions and colleges to join their Day of Action next Tuesday. Their union, the University College Union (UCU) has backed the day of action in support of their Tower Hamlets members who are on indefinite strike...
SRI LANKAN tea workers, some 400,000 strong, are mainly Tamil women workers, who work for around £1 a day and live, along with their families, in crude lineshacks which have absolutely no amenities and which were constructed in the 19th century by British imperialism. Their wages are not enough to...
Over two hundred postal workers from London, Edinburgh and Crewe lobbied the Unite head office in Holborn yesterday to demand Unite leaders Derek Simpson and Tony Woodley act to stop the union’s Royal Mail manager members strikebreaking. Kenny Logan, Scotland No2 Branch, Edinburgh, CWU (Communication Workers’ Union) branch secretary told...
THE first thing about the McKinsey and Company report was that it was commissioned by the Brown government, at a great cost, and was kept secret by them until it was leaked to the Health Service Journal. When you commission McKinsey to do a hatchet job, your are fairly...
ROYAL Mail staff across the whole of the London postal area walked out on strike again yesterday. It was the latest action in the capital against what members of the Communication Workers Union (CWU) describe as ‘bully-boy tactics’ by Royal Mail to destroy their jobs and working conditions. Many CWU members...
Government ministers rushed out denials yesterday in the wake of a report calling for the axing of 137,000 NHS doctors, nurses and other clinical staff as well as managers. The job cuts were proposed by management consultants McKinsey and Company who were called in by the Department of Health to...
Over two hundred postal workers from London, Edinburgh and Crewe lobbied the Unite head office in Holborn yesterday, to demand Unite leaders Derek Simpson and Tony Woodley act to stop Unite-organised Royal Mail manager members strikebreaking. CWU (Communication Workers’ Union) London regional secretary Martin Walsh told News Line at the...
The Communication Workers’ Union (CWU) is lobbying the Unite head office in Holborn, central London, at 11.30 this morning to demand it stops its Royal Mail manager members’ strikebreaking activities against postmen. The lobby will be followed by a national rally at Friends House, Euston at 1.30pm. Earlier this week, Mark...
TODAY the Communication Workers Union (CWU) London Divisional Committee has called a demonstration at the Unite union’s head office in Holborn, central London. The issue is that Unite organises the management at the Royal Mail. Currently its members are doing everything possible to break the resistance of the...
More than 1,000 people face execution in Iraq, said Amnesty International on Tuesday, as it published a new report on the extensive imposition of death sentences in the country. Some 150 of these prisoners have exhausted all means of appeal or clemency and are at immediate risk of death. The majority...
THE forty-year-old Libyan revolution is being celebrated with enthusiasm this week by the Libyan masses in Tripoli. The revolution, led by Colonel Gadaffi, put an end to the rule of the British stooge King Idris and nationalised the oil industry. It laid the basis for the modern, independent Libyan state, whose...
Israeli warships bombarded Palestinian boats off the Sudaniyya shore north of Gaza City Monday morning, Nizar Ayyash, head of the Fishermen’s Union reported. Ayyash said the boat, which belonged to Umar Ibrahim Al-Habeil, was set ablaze by several shells fired from an Israeli naval unit operating in the...
A LEADING CWU (Communication Workers Union) representative in the Midlands yesterday said a national strike was needed to tackle ‘all our difficulties’. Malcolm Brundrett, CWU Area Delivery Rep, Midland Number 7 Branch, also demanded that the Unite union leadership say where they stand on their manager members in Royal Mail...
‘Lebanon cannot be a soft spot for harming Syria and the latter cannot be a conduit for harming Lebanon,’ said Hezbollah’s Sheikh Na’im Qasim in Damascus commenting on USA/Israel, ties with Syria. ‘Normal Lebanese-Syrian relations is the solution and what is required,’ he added. ‘The resistance has foiled the new...
THE Rajapakse dictatorship in Sri Lanka, which is backed with British finance and arms, and British big business investment, is continuing with its dictatorship over both the Tamil people and the Sinhalese workers. There are now hundreds of thousands of Tamils in internment (concentration) camps in the north of the...
The Communication Workers Union (CWU) London Divisional Committee has called a demonstration at the Unite union’s head office in Holborn, central London, on Thursday. The lobby at 11.30am will be followed by a rally at 1.30pm at Friends Meeting House, Euston. The CWU flyer says: ‘Let’s tell Unite how it is! ‘Get...