Monthly Archives: December 2009
WITH the EU’s bankers and bosses spurring him on, Greece’s ‘socialist’ leader, Papandreou, has vowed to tackle the country’s economic crisis and impose the same kind of savage cuts that have just been adopted by the Irish government. With the Greek stock market collapsing, the bosses of the...
CHANCELLOR Darling has announced that £600m will be ‘saved’ by 2012/13 from across ‘higher education, science and research budgets, including student support’, meaning that there are to be redundancies amongst scientists, lecturers and university staff, as well as a lifting of the cap on tuition fees. Professor...
THE President of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions and General President of SIPTU, Jack O’Connor, has attacked Budget 2010 as ‘callous, unjust and uncaring’. In his response to the budget speech he said, ‘Budget 2010 must rank as the most callous, unjust and uncaring budget introduced by any...
The Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) decided yesterday to hold a strike ballot amongst 270,000 PCS members working for the civil service and its related bodies if the government proceeds to impose changes to the Civil Service Compensation Scheme. It also decided to launch legal action with other unions...
WHITTINGTON Hospital is threatened with being reduced to a ‘local hospital’ through having its Accident and Emergency and other vital Departments closed, and closed through a ‘merger’ with the Royal Free Hospital. In an ‘Adjournment Debate’ in the House of Commons on Wednesday 2nd December, Jeremy Corbyn...
CHANCELLOR Darling made his pre-budget speech to the House of Commons yesterday afternoon in the form of a Labour general election manifesto. His line was that the hardest ‘choices’ were on hand but were not immediate. Savage across the board cuts on the whole of the working class could wait...
OVER 15,000 Greek school and university students and secondary school teachers marched through the Athens city centre on Monday afternoon in commemoration of the killing by police a year ago of 15-years old school student Alexis Grigoropoulos. The march was organised by the school teachers’ union OLME and school...
THE Labour-supporting leaders of the National Union of Students (NUS) have been forced into a position where they have had to call for ‘heads to roll’ following a report into the university loans delays, which found that there were ‘conspicuous failures’. There have been tens of thousands of complaints about...
THE PCS trade union yesterday accused the bankers’ Prime Minister, Gordon Brown of ‘beginning a bidding war on who can cut the most.’ The bidding war is, of course, to pay off the bankers’ debts, and get back the £850bn that the government has put at their disposal. The PCS...
British Member of Parliament George Galloway left the UK on Sunday, December 6th with a convoy of humanitarian aid and will arrive in the Gaza Strip on December 27, according to the Hamas government’s director of the anti-siege committee, Hamdi Sha’ath. Galloway’s Lifeline Three convoy is expected to arrive with...
Prime Minister Brown yesterday outlined plans to slash government employees’ jobs and pay. He said public sector workers earning an ‘over-generous’ salary would be ‘named and shamed’, claiming many had ‘lost touch’ with normality. During a speech titled ‘Putting the frontline first: Smarter Government’, Brown said that ‘this plan, which is...
Tens of thousands of Greek school and university students, young workers and unemployed youth participated on Sunday in mass and militant rallies in all the main cities on the first anniversary of the killing by police of 15-year-old school boy Alexis Grigoropoulos. Youth clashed with the hated MAT riot police...
The announcement of changes to civil service redundancy payments made today by the Cabinet Office is an outrageous breach of faith with the unions, the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union said on Friday. Following proposals announced in July to cut the terms of the compensation scheme, ministers had promised...
YESTERDAY, there were major clashes on the streets of Athens as 6,000 riot police clashed with tens of thousands of workers and youth who were marching on the first anniversary of the police shooting to death of 15-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos, on December 6, 2008. On Saturday night, armed police raided...
Clashes broke out yesterday between police and demonstrators across Greece as marchers commemorated the first anniversary of the fatal police shooting of 15-year-old Alexis Grigoropoulos. Riot police fired tear gas at youths hurling stones and petrol bombs in central Athens. In the northern port city of Thessaloniki, violence erupted during a...
Ahead of the Chancellor’s Pre-Budget Report on Wednesday, the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) has called for cuts across the board in public services, pay and pensions. In his report, Chancellor Darling is expected give more details of how over four years he plans to halve the massive state deficit...
Tata Corus’s shock decision to mothball Teesside Cast Products (TCP) is a ‘premature decision that will have disastrous consequences for Teesside and the UK economy’, said the Community Union yesterday. TCP’s Redcar Blast Furnace, Lackenby steelmaking and the South Bank Coke Ovens will be mothballed at the end of January...
BY JOHN COULTER AT STORMONT DUBLIN – Ian Paisley senior may be hauled out of semi-political retirement to save the rapidly crumbling Northern Assembly, a well-placed source close to the Downing Street talks claimed last night. The Prime Ministers Gordon Brown and Brian Cowen have held crisis talks in London to avert...
THERE were oceans of tears yesterday for the 1,700 workers who are to be sacked when Corus mothballs the greater part of its plant on Teesside, in January, but no plans by the trade union leaders or the government to keep Corus Teesside open. The employer Corus blamed the closure...
Nearly all Greek university departments and over 500 schools throughout the country were yesterday being occupied by students in mass and militant mobilisations commemorating the killing of 16-years-old school boy Alexis Grigoropoulos by a police ‘special guard’ in December 2008. The killing led to a widespread three-week uprising last December...
CITY Minister Lord Myners yesterday said shareholders should take action to stop million pound bonuses after Royal Bank of Scotland directors threatened to resign if their bonuses were blocked. He did not outline any action that the government, the major shareholder in the bank intended to take. RBS...
Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) General Secretary David Begg said on Wednesday that the Dublin government must now ‘choose between continued deference to the very wealthy or genuine support for low to middle income earners and the vulnerable in Irish society.’ Speaking at the launch of the Congress...
PRESIDENT Obama yesterday gave the go-ahead for a massive attack on the Afghan people in which tens of thousands of men, women and children will die. This decision to mass murder was packaged as part of the war on terror and vital for the defence of ordinary US citizens. Obama told...
‘we are holding this special vigil because it has been a long eight months,’ Julia Tomlinson, the widow of Ian Tomlinson told over 200 friends and supporters on Tuesday evening. She was addressing a candlelight vigil outside the Royal Exchange, just opposite Cornhill in the City of London. [kP,[zU$t Tomlinson died...
General Motors Board of Directors Chairman, Ed Whitacre, known for his asset stripping and merger programme at telecoms empire AT&T, has taken the helm at GM. He announced on the GM website that at its monthly meeting in Detroit on Tuesday, ‘the General Motors Board of Directors accepted the resignation...
HOSPITALS are facing closure across London as the government begins making savage cuts to the NHS budget to deal with its debts crisis. With the prospect of looming budget cuts, health bosses in the capital have been told to ‘rethink the provision of services’. But angry opponents of planned cuts and...
The UK has dramatically slumped to the bottom of international education tables, the University and College Union stressed today. In the past twelve years it has been overtaken by countries such as Portugal, New Zealand, Austria, Switzerland, Korea, Ireland, Greece, Hungary and the Czech Republic. The news comes on the day...
THE Morgan Stanley bank is worried that the world crisis is going to shatter the already bankrupt UK economy, causing a flight of capital out of the country and a crash of the pound sterling, unleashing a deeper slump and massive inflation. It fears that the UK will be the...
‘BUILD the Workers Revolutionary Party and the Young Socialists and the Fourth International.’ That was the message from the News Line/Trotsky Anniversary rally attended by 250 youth and workers at Queen Mary College in east London on Opening the rally, Workers Revolutionary Pa’rty General Secretary Frank Sweeney said the banking collapse...
AFTER the Abu Dhabi stockmarket experienced a record one-day fall of 8.3 per cent, and Dubai’s Financial Market Index fell 7.3 per cent yesterday, Dubai’s finance minister, Abdulrahman al-Saleh, shocked the capitalist world by saying that the Dubai government was not responsible for the state-owned Dubai World’s £50bn of...
Prime Minister Brown yesterday announced the UK is sending 500 extra troops to Afghanistan early this month. He revealed that, along with special forces operating in the country, the UK contingent will rise from 9,000 to over 10,000. In a statement to the MPs in the House of Commons yesterday afternoon,...