Monthly Archives: November 2009
The UK government should immediately order an independent judicial inquiry into the role and complicity of British security services in the torture of terrorism suspects in Pakistan, New York-based rights group, Human Rights Watch said in a report released this week. The 46-page report, Cruel Britannia: British Complicity in the...
PRESIDENT Obama is set to throw tonnes of petrol onto the Afghan flames. After months of strategic and tactical discussions with his military and political leaders, the military are to get their way with a major expansion of the war. be sent to Afghanistan to put the situation right, especially in...
‘This world capitalist crisis is opening up the door to socialist revolution to millions of working class people round the world.’ So said Workers Revolutionary Party General Secretary Frank Sweeney as he opened yesterday’s rally in east London marking the News Line 40th Anniversary and 60th Anniversary of the assassination...
An important event for the working class of Leningrad and the entire world by Mikhail Polupanov This exhibition is dedicated to 130th anniversary of outstanding proletarian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky, and was opened 6 November 2009 in the State Museum of Political History of Russia in Leningrad. It is very symbolical that...
DUBAI’S ‘debt repayment’ postponement for six months has brought renewed havoc to European, Asian and North American stock markets. They have all been reminded that the crisis of capitalism is world wide and that they have not felt the last of its hammer blows. If the oil-rich Middle East cannot repay...
Public sector trade union Unison yesterday called for Basildon and Thurrock University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust to be taken back under NHS control. It also called for a public inquiry into patient care at the Trust’s Basildon and Orsett hospitals. The call follows unusually high death rates at the hospital, and...
During two months when trade unionists from Colombia were visiting America to take part in trade union training – four of their colleagues were assassinated. The Colombian workers participated in the Trade Union Strengthening programme sponsored by the Solidarity Centre, which gets funding and support from the US Department of...
SUCH WAS the fawning support, given by Tony Blair to President George Bush, that Christopher Meyer, the ex-UK ambassador to the United States, was able to taunt Blair at yesterday’s session of the Iraq inquiry. He said that extreme right-wing Tory leader Thatcher would have had much more influence on...
General Motors (GM) yesterday announced 354 job cuts at Vauxhall’s UK plant in Luton and none in Ellesmere Port. On Wednesday, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) for Opel/Vauxhall Nick Reilly said GM would cut 9,000 jobs across Europe as part of its restructuring plans. GM said yesterday it planned to cut...
Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser to US President Bush, was the first person UK ambassador to the US Christopher Meyer heard mention Iraq on September 11, 2001, he told The Iraq Inquiry yesterday. Meyer told the panel probing the run-up to the Iraq war and beyond that the Bush...
YESTERDAY the Secretary of State for Defence announced in Parliament the establishment of a public inquiry into the incident of alleged mistreatment and murder of prisoners at Camp Abu Naji, a British base in SE Iraq, in May 2004. This will be the second public inquiry into the...
GM’S crisis has deepened with the collapse of its deal to sell Saab, and as the EU states do battle over whose plants are to close. The sale of GM’s Swedish unit Saab has been called off after the Swedish sports car maker Koenigsegg said it could no longer carry...
GM Europe will keep all four of its German Opel plants open, interim chief executive Nick Reilly revealed yesterday. GM issued the following statement: ‘Opel/Vauxhall CEO Nick Reilly gave representatives of the European Employee Forum on Wednesday a first look at the company’s plan to make the Opel and...
‘WE’RE not going to let Chase Farm close,’ Bill Rogers, North East London Council of Action Secretary told News Line yesterday at a lively picket outside the hospital. He said: ‘450,000 people are going to lose access to their hospital by the looks of things, if the so-called mergers in...
THE Bank of England governor, Mervyn King, has dropped a bombshell in a letter to the House of Commons Treasury Committee. He revealed that the Bank had secretly intervened as the ‘lender of last resort’, to hand £61.6 billion to the Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds banks,...
Alone & lost in LABOUR, a survey by the Royal College Midwives and ‘Netmums’, highlights a shortage of midwives and lack of postnatal and antenatal care. A survey of 3,508 UK mothers’ experiences of maternity services by Netmums.com, and the Royal College of Midwives (RCM), has revealed critical gaps in...
LARGE-scale hospital cuts and closures are now being organised for immediately after the next general election. These cuts have been dictated by the current enormously indebted state of British capitalism. Britain is heading for a £200bn plus budget deficit for this year, and a national debt approaching £1 trillion. To...
The North East London Council of Action is holding a picket of Chase Farm Hospital today as news emerged that huge cuts are being planned throughout the north London area. Enfield Save Chase Farm councillor Kate Wilkinson told News Line: ‘We are very concerned that discussions are taking...
PRESIDENT Ahmadinejad has said that the West has ‘run out of ammo’ against Iran. He added that Iran will never accept commitments from Western countries that will go against its rights and interests. Speaking in a live interview on Iran’s provincial East Azerbaijan TV on 20 November, Ahmadinejad said that the...
German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble said yesterday that the Merkel government was seeking clarity from General Motors on plans for Opel. This came on the eve of today’s meeting in Brussels between EU Industry Commissioner Günter Verheugen, European economy ministers and representatives of GM to discuss the future of the...
The Gaza Freedom March that will take place in Gaza on December 31st is an historic initiative to break the siege that has imprisoned the 1.5 million people who live there. The International Coalition to End the Illegal Siege of Gaza says: ‘Conceived in the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson...
THE Labour government is bringing in additional legislation under which children as young as 14 years old will be banned from wearing hoods or clothing that the police say are the colours of local gangs. Youth are also to be banned from having ‘violent dogs,’ or going into areas that...
THE Chairman of Iran’s Expediency Council, Ali Akbar Rafsanjani, made it very clear last Wednesday what Iran’s position is on its right to develop and use nuclear power. He said: ‘Give us nuclear fuel or we will produce it.’ Rafsanjani made clear that ‘Tehran will continue its nuclear enrichment programme if...
The Interim Agreement (I.A.), brokered by Brendan Barber of the TUC, between Royal Mail and the CWU, has allowed Royal Mail to press ahead with its attacks on CWU members. Nowhere has Royal Mail been forced to roll back any of the draconian measures implemented by executive action that were...
Greek public sector workers on short contracts staged a successful 24-hour national strike last Thursday demanding permanent jobs and full labour rights. Their struggle was supported by the journalists, technicians and staff of ERT (State Television and Radio Corporation) who also went on a 24-hour strike. A large percentage of ERT’s...
BUSWORKERS employed by East London Bus Group are continuing their 48-hour strike against a pay freeze and management onslaught on their terms and conditions today, and until 3am Sunday morning. The 48-hour strike – involving 58 bus routes across east London and the City – is being taken by 2,400...
MEMBERS of the RMT rail union and the Unite union’s Justice for Cleaners campaign staged a protest in central London on Wednesday, demanding: ‘Stop Cowboy Cleaning Contractors – Make London Underground cleaning part of a public London Underground!’ Urging support for their struggle, the RMT said: ‘Private company Initial has...
The Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) was divided over its ‘quantitative easing’ policy of printing money this month. The Minutes of the last MPC meeting of November 4th and 5th state ‘there were a number of headwinds that would be likely to impede the recovery. . . ‘Most...
The Octagon Theatre Bolton will mark the 25th anniversary of the Great Miners’ Strike when Artistic Director David Thacker revives his acclaimed production of The Enemies Within. The play was created in 1985 using real-life accounts of striking miners and their families following interviews conducted by writer Ron Rose, David...
THE UK’s public sector net deficit for October reached £11.4bn and is the highest monthly deficit since records began. The national debt at £829.7bn is now running at 59.2 per cent of the country’s gross Domestic Product (GDP). At the end of October 2008 the national debt was...
Over 20,000 students, youth and workers took part in a militant anti-imperialist demonstration in Athens on Tuesday to commemorate the 36th anniversary of the Polytechnic students’ uprising in November 1973 against the military dictatorship which ruled Greece since 1967. They marched to the fort-like building of the USA Embassy which...
GENERAL Motors’ head of operations in Europe, Nick Reilly, has a history – he was in charge of the operation that shut down Vauxhall Motors, Luton, in 2001-02. Now he has been brought back by Fritz Henderson, the big boss from Detroit, to proceed with the ‘restructuring in earnest’ of...
‘The BMA has long voiced concerns about the Independent Sector Treatment Centre programme,’ a British Medical Association (BMA) spokeswoman told News Line yesterday. She was responding to the news that NHS London has suspended the contract of private company Clinicenta to provide ‘out-of-hospital’ NHS services across 20 London boroughs,...
‘The Iraqis today do not have control over their political, security or social situation – control is in the hands of the occupation, those who came with it, and those who benefit from it’. So said Dr Harith al-Dari, Secretary-General of the Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS) in Iraq, in...
ALL the ‘we will win the war in Afghanistan’ propaganda has now been dumped as the political leaders of imperialism have begun to grasp that neither the workers at home nor many of the troops in the field will take much more of the Afghan slaughter. The new, not so...
