Monthly Archives: October 2009
Palestinian Authority president Mahmud Abbas tried on Sunday to defend his controversial decision to support deferring a vote on the damning Gaza war report at the UN Human Rights Council. Abbas said the Palestinian delegation at the Geneva-based council backed the October 2 postponement of a vote on the so-called...
LONDON postal workers taking strike action again yesterday at offices across the capital were angered by the offer of their union leaders to Royal Mail to cancel the national strike, if Royal Mail will talk to them about their ‘Business Plan’. At the Ealing South Delivery Office, Ealing CWU branch...
Prime Minister Brown yesterday announced another 500 UK troops are being sent to Afghanistan. In a statement to MPs in the House of Commons on Afghanistan and Pakistan, Brown revealed: ‘Since 2006-07 we have increased annual military spending on the Afghan operation – spending from the Treasury Reserve, in addition...
THE 24/7 Alliance launched a DVD yesterday morning in Dublin to argue its case against further cutbacks in pay, operational conditions and services to the public. The Alliance also reported on the overwhelming support for the first phase of its campaign ‘Taking the Risks – Paying Our...
THE unsolicited public display of pacifism yesterday by the CWU leadership, in the face of the most vicious daily attacks on their membership by Royal Mail management, has greatly angered the vast majority of CWU members. The membership has just voted by 76 per cent in a 67 per...
AFTER weeks of extensive negotiations, an agreement on the future of the UK Vauxhall plants has been reached between Unite, the biggest UK union in car and components manufacturing, and Magna, the Canadian auto parts company and preferred bidder for General Motors’ European operations. Unite described the agreement as...
The Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) yesterday accused the government of privatising and ‘selling off the family silver at a knock down price’ to pay for the failure of the City and financial institutions. The charge came as Gordon Brown today announced a £16 billion public assets sell-off as...
THE Prime Minister began yesterday to sell off anything and everything that can be used to raise much needed cash, £16bn in fact, to try to dent the £175bn government deficit that is expected to rise to £250bn in the next 12 months. His government has built up this debt,...
The Palestinian National Authority (PNA) has executed a U-turn over action on the Goldstone report on the Israeli war on Gaza last December 2008/January 2009. The PNA asked the United Nations Human Rights Council on Thursday to hold a special meeting soon on the contentious UN report blasting the Israeli...
The International Metalworkers’ Federation has joined a global campaign calling on G20 heads of state to protect workers in one of the world’s most dangerous industries – shipbreaking. A new report produced by the US-based National Labour Committee titled Where Ships and Workers Go to Die - Shipbreaking in Bangladesh...
AT her press conference in London yesterday the US Secretary of State, Clinton, volunteered that the Taleban attack on the headquarters of the Pakistani army showed that ‘extremists are increasingly threatening the authority of the state.’ She had to hastily add: ‘But we see no evidence that they are...
Postal workers yesterday condemned as ‘obscene’ over £10m in ‘performance-related bonus’ payments to Royal Mail executives for pushing through ‘efficiency savings’. Royal Mail Group has paid its executive board members a total of more than £22m in salaries alone, with the executives receiving £10.7m in performance-related bonuses since 2003. A...
Fatah’s top leadership called for a general strike throughout the nation for yesterday, in protest against the ‘fierce and planned Israeli attacks’ that have been launched on Jerusalem holy sites. The decision follows a week of high tension in Jerusalem after Israeli settlers backed by police were seen entering the...
GENERAL Sir Richard Dannatt is to become Defence Minister if there is another Tory government. He will do so, not by becoming a Tory MP from standing as a candidate and winning a seat in next May’s General Election. He does not feel that he is required to justify himself...
BUSINESS Secretary Mandelson’s Department and the Unite union both said yesterday that talks on Wednesday with new GM Europe owner, Magna, were ‘constructive’ but did not want to give details. Unite co-leader Tony Woodley and national officer Dave Osborne have offered to accept pay and pension cuts in a bid...
‘If we don’t take a stand now, you will see the postal service in the UK destroyed for ever,’ Communication Workers Union (CWU) deputy general secretary Dave Ward warned yesterday. He was speaking, in the wake of CWU members’ 76 per cent vote in favour of national strike action. There...
CWU members have voted, in a 67 per cent turnout, a much bigger turnout than in a British general election, for strike action, with a 76 per cent majority vote for national action. The decisiveness of the turnout and the yes vote, is a product of the postal...
Bagneres de Bigorre, a small town near Tarbes has been hit by a wave of redundancies and short-time working in the local factories. Over 500 responded to the main national unions’ call for a day of action for jobs, meeting and marching through the streets to the local government administration...
The Palestinian National Authority (PNA) decision not to press a vote on a UN report on the Gaza war has angered many Palestinians and weakened president Mahmud Abbas, observers say. The PNA agreed to delay a vote on the damning report at the UN Human Rights Council last Friday, after...
BRITISH Airways has decided to cut 1,700 jobs and introduce a two-year pay freeze for cabin crew. It also intends to discuss wage cuts for BA workers with the Unite trade union. The job cuts and wage freeze are to be imposed without any agreement with Unite. The airline has also...
UK industrial output collapsed in August, unexpectedly as far as the bourgeoisie was concerned, destroying any remaining thoughts of green shoots of recovery. Bourgeois economists who had been expecting industrial growth of 0.3 per cent, and to be able to announce that the slump was over, were shell-shocked when...
The Greek working class and youth have delivered a deadly blow against the conservative government of Kostas Karamanlis and his neo-liberal policies in Sunday’s general election by voting for the Social Democratic PASOK party of Yiorghos Papandreou, who is the new Prime Minister. The US President Barak Obama was the...
HAMAS Political Bureau Head Khaled Mishaal last weekend pledged that Jerusalem will be liberated again during a speech rally in Damascus to mark the anniversary of the liberation of Jerusalem from the Crusaders by Salah al-Din. He began by telling the people that it is a great day for him...
THE PASOK socialist party and its leader, George Papandreou, won a landslide election victory on Sunday in Greece's snap general election, winning over 43 per cent of the vote against the New Democracy’s 35 per cent. In fact, it was the Greek working class and youth who forced the right...
PUBLIC sector union Unison yesterday slammed the latest Tory and Labour attacks on disabled people and the unemployed. Tory leader Cameron announced a ‘big bold’ shake up of the welfare system at the Tory party conference in Manchester. The Tories plan to get more people off incapacity benefit (IB) and ‘into...
Andrew Stroehlein, International Crisis Group’s Communications Director, has slammed the Sri Lankan regime’s ‘duplicity’ over the 240,000 Tamils being held in desperate conditions in internment camps. TamilNet reports that during his testimony to the European Parliament Subcommittee on Human Rights on the situation in Sri Lanka on Thursday, Stroehlein noted...
THE US economy has seen 7.6 million jobs destroyed since the US and worldwide slump began, and then deepened, after the crash of the major US banks, especially Lehman Brothers in September 2008. One year after that collapse, the US economy lost 263,000 jobs in September 2009, far ...
ANGRY busworkers, members of the RMT, yesterday demonstrated outside London United’s Hounslow bus garage, as part of their fight for trade union recognition. Since joining the RMT transport union, management at six garages run by United and its parent company, Transdev, have refused to recognise the RMT trade union, preferring...
SOUTHWARK Council says it is prepared to take action to evict remaining tenants from the Heygate Estate, if they refuse ‘reasonable’ offers to leave the council estate in Elephant and Castle, south-east London. The Lib Dem and Tory-run council says that there are 130 remaining tenants, 82 secure tenants, 25...
THERE are more and more tragedies which prove that private companies, whose purpose is solely to make profits, have no place in the NHS. We have already seen the experience of the Mid-Staffordshire NHS Trust hospital. In order to become a Foundation Hospital business it made £10 million in cuts, sacking...
Unite joint general secretary Tony Woodley yesterday morning told the BBC Today programme that Spain and Britain had refused to sign a memorandum of understanding with new GM Europe owners Magna on Wednesday. Woodley said: ‘The plan is very obvious that the four German plants, two of which under the...
BOTH Spain and the UK have refused to sign the Memorandum of Understanding that binds together the Magna-Sberbank-GM deal under which there are to be 10,500 redundancies in what was GM Europe. These are made up of 1,400 in the UK, 4,500 in Germany, 2,600 in Antwerp (with the...
‘royal Mail – not for sale! Mandy, Mandy, Mandy – Out Out Out!’ chanted over 200 postal workers as they lobbied the heavily-fortified Labour Party Conference in Brighton on Tuesday. The Communication Workers Union (CWU) lobby was to demand the Labour government keeps the Royal Mail public, and restores...
PREMIER Brown’s speech at the Labour Party conference reeked with bourgeois morality and hypocrisy. There is to be a slap on the wrist for the bankers whose system has collapsed, while there is to be a war on the poor. Brown blamed immoral bankers who had...