Monthly Archives: September 2010
ON the opening day of the TUC conference in Manchester yesterday a lively 50 strong lobby of Workers Revolutionary Party and Young socialists members greeted delegates with demands for a General Strike to defeat the Tory cuts. A delegation of Gate Gourmet sacked workers, gained tremendous support from delegates...
DELEGATES to the TUC Conference in Manchester yesterday voted almost unanimously for Composite Motion 10, Defending public services and for Paragraphs 3.1 and 3.13 of the General Council’s report. Leaders of all the major TUC unions spoke in favour of the motion, with many warning that the existence of the...
THE imperialist invasion of Afghanistan is coming apart at the seams. In fact, the UK troops themselves are now rejecting it, as a legitimate operation, while the Afghan leader Mullah Omar has publicly stated that the war has been won by the Afghan people, and that it is just a...
TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber yesterday warned that the coalition’s cuts ‘not only threaten services but risk economic recovery’. He was speaking ahead of the 142nd TUC Congress in Manchester which begins today. He claimed ‘there are practical, alternative ways to reduce the deficit’. He added: ‘There is no need for such...
THE TUC General Council statement issued on Saturday constitutes a betrayal of the working class and the trade unions. It seeks to divert the movement from action to bring bring down the Coalition, to pleading with the Tories to change their policies and favour cuts over a...
‘Something very dark lurks in the evidence files of the Mulcaire case, and dark and mysterious forces are keeping it that way,’ Labour MP Tom Watson told the House of Commons last Thursday. Speaking for the emergency motion to refer the allegations of phone hacking against MPs to the Standards...
THE Rail, Maritime and Transport union (RMT) have submitted a motion to next week’s TUC congress calling for the TUC to organise a co-ordinated ‘fight-back’ by the unions and local communities against the savage cuts being imposed by the Cameron coalition government. This motion calls for the TUC to organise...
The GMB trade union yesterday pledged to defend jobs and services in the wake of the results of the BBC-commissioned Experian survey. The results of the survey show that public spending cuts that are in the pipeline will impact hardest on the old industrial heartland economies in the North East,...
‘THIS IS a match-fix for privatisation,’ the leader of the Communications Workers Union (CWU) said yesterday, after the Tory-Lib Dem coalition announced it was rushing through legislation to privatise Royal Mail. ‘We’re not going to sit back and see something that’s been in the public’s hands for 360 years privatised....
DIRECTORS of the UK’s top companies have amassed pensions pots worth an average of £3.8 million, according to the new TUC PensionsWatch survey published Thursday. The TUC’s eighth annual PensionsWatch survey, which analyses the pension arrangements of 329 directors from 102 of the UK’s top companies, shows that the average...
TRANSPORT union RMT has tabled a motion for the TUC Congress in Manchester next week which sets out a blueprint for a coordinated trade union and community fight-back against the cuts programme and the ‘class warfare’ of the Cameron government. The RMT motion calls on the trade union movement to; •...
IT WAS asserted by economists long ago that labour is the source of all wealth, and Federick Engels – the lifelong friend and collaborator of Karl Marx – wrote during the heyday of capitalism: ‘It is just this – next to nature, which supplies it with the material that...
the House of Commons Standards and Privileges committee will investigate phone hacking by newspapers. This follows fresh allegations against the ‘News of the World’ and its former editor – now Prime Minister Cameron’s communications chief – Andy Coulson. MPs yesterday backed an emergency resolution from Labour MP Chris Bryant, after Labour...
Joe and Christine Loughrell are fighting eviction from their family home of 30-years. Joe was a resident caretaker for Lewisham Council for 35-years, having joined in 1971 and retired in 2006. Christine worked for the GLC and then London Corporation all her working life. Joe worked in two other areas to...
Downing Street Director of Communications Andy Coulson is under renewed pressure after it was announced yesterday that MPs will hold an emergency debate in the House of Commons about newspaper phone hacking today. House of Commons Speaker John Bercow said he had accepted a request from Labour former minister Chris...
ON TUESDAY over three million French workers took to the streets with massive demonstrations in Paris and Marseilles to make sure that Sarkozy got the message, that if he insists on proceeding with his plans to increase the retirement age to 62, he will have a revolution to...
RAIL union RMT said Tuesday’s strike for tube safety and safe staffing levels on London Underground was ‘rock solid’, and demanded that the rail regulator launch an investigation into ‘breaches of post-King’s Cross fire safety rules’. The tube strike involved members of both the RMT and TSSA. The RMT said...
RAIL union RMT said yesterday’s strike for tube safety and safe staffing levels on London Underground was ‘rock solid’, and demanded that the rail regulator launch an investigation into ‘breaches of post-King’s Cross fire safety rules’. The tube strike involved members of both the RMT and TSSA. RMT General Secretary Bob...
BRENDAN Gold, Unite’s national secretary for civil air transport, said, after emerging from Monday’s BA Cabin crew rally in Kempton Park, that there would be a strike ballot for action by BA cabin crew in the run-up to Christmas. However, this was not put to the mass meeting of 2,000...
ISRAEL is up to its old tricks, which does not make anyone optimistic about seeing an end to the Middle East conflict, says an Egyptian commentator. Wathiq Wajih said on Eyptian radio that just a ‘few days’ after the launch of direct talks between the Palestinian Authority (PA) and...
Public sector unions in South Africa, supported by the whole of the working class, are in conflict with the ANC government over a decent wage – bringing to an end the settlement that was made after the release of Nelson Mandela whereby the black middle class was given the...
The US Economic Policy Institute (EPI) last week published three reports showing the extent to which America’s workers are losing ground this Labour Day, said the AFL-CIO union federation on Sunday. The AFL-CIO stressed: ‘People are dropping out of the workforce because there are no jobs and those workers who...
UP to 2,000 British Airways cabin crew attended a BASSA meeting at Kempton Park near Heathrow Airport yesterday, which heard that the leadership of Unite will hold peace talks with BA bosses next week. Negotiations on ending the cabin crew dispute will take place between Unite joint leaders Tony Woodley...
THE leaders of Labour, ‘New’ or otherwise, chose to debate their leadership credentials yesterday over the Murdoch-owned Sky TV, the centre of the Murdoch media empire. This came into being as a direct result of the sacking of 6,000 Fleet Street printers, in the year-long battle to break the Fleet...
‘I WANT an immediate ballot and indefinite strike action now. Let’s see them cope with that! I don’t want to wait until Christmas’, a British Airways cabin crew member told News Line last Friday. She was speaking ahead of today’s 11am meeting of the 12,000-strong British Airways Stewards and Stewardess...
THE 18th Constitutional Amendment Bill will be debated and put to the vote on September 8th in the Sri Lankan parliament, following a decision taken at a meeting by the leaders of parliamentary political parties presided over by Speaker Chamal Rajapaksa. TamilNet reports that the proposed 18th Amendment enables an...
Hamas warned on Thursday that the summit held in Washington and the resumption of direct peace talks with the ‘Zionist enemy’ only serve the US-Israeli objective of ‘liquidating’ the Palestinian cause. A Hamas official said in a statement that the movement rejects the negotiations ‘which are intended to be an...
THE leadership scuffling that is taking place in the Labour Party is underlining one major fact – its crisis is terminal. This is a party that was established by the trade unions to defend their interests in parliament and to legislate the way to socialism. The reality was that,...
HUNDREDS of thousands of people are going hungry in Los Angeles County, California, in the richest state in the richest country in the world. Demand for assistance from local food banks jumped by 16.4 per cent compared to last year, and 43.9 per cent over the past two years, according...
AMID the media frenzy surrounding the publication of former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s autobiography, A Journey, ballot papers were sent out for the Labour leadership election on Wednesday. Was this a coincidence, or is the figurehead of ‘new’ Labour setting out to influence the vote to try to get...
‘Estimates reveal that there are more than 89,000 war widows in the North and Eastern provinces and more than 25,000 of these widows are in Batticaloa district in the Eastern province,’ Tamil National Alliance (TNA) Batticaloa district MP, P. Selvarasa said in a meeting of the War Victimised Women...
Strikes by 10,000 Tube workers will begin on Monday after talks at conciliation service ACAS broke up yesterday. This followed a failure on the part of London Underground to remove the threat of cuts to safety and safe staffing levels that would have allowed meaningful discussions to take place, the...
As Palestinian leaders were preparing for direct talks with Israeli prime minister Netanyahu in Washington today, the village mayor in the West Bank town of Salfit said that ten armed Israeli settlers opened fire at three Palestinian teenagers. The attack came as they tended to their land in Deir Istiya...
THOUSANDS more working-class families are going to their local Citizen Advice Bureau because of the effects of unemployment, debts, threatened loss of homes and benefit cuts imposed by the Tory-Lib Dem government. The Citizen Advice Bureaux (CAB) reported yesterday that, across England and Wales, it dealt with 6% more...
Millions of graduates will now face paying interest on their student loans again as new interest rates came into effect yesterday. Payments to the Student Loans Company include a 1.5 per cent interest rate from September 1st for those who took out a loan after 1998, and 4.4 per cent...
‘WE WANT the strike action reinstated immediately and extended, so that we can defeat Walsh’s union-busting operation once and for all,’ British Airways Stewards and Stewardesses Association (BASSA) member ‘Felicity’ told News Line yesterday. Using a pseudonym to prevent victimisation, she said that all members of the BASSA branch of...
THERE were no pictures beamed around the world yesterday of United States President Barack Obama at a passing out parade in Baghdad on the day that America had designated as the end of combat operations in Iraq. Instead, Vice-President Joe Biden slipped into Iraq unannounced, because of security concerns, and...
NEW Orleans workers and their families are struggling to survive a desperate poverty crisis, five years after the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe, the AFL-CIO union said on Monday. Poverty levels in the city are twice the US national levels despite better-than-average unemployment figures. ‘The problem is that nobody’s making a living...