Monthly Archives: November 2010
RESPONDING to the announcement today of an 85 billion euro European Union and IMF loan facility for Ireland, SIPTU General President Jack O’Connor said ‘It is now clear why the National Recovery Plan unveiled last week provided for no investment in the economy from the National Pension...
RMT and TSSA members staged their latest 24-hour strike against mass sackings on London Underground yesterday. At Harrow-on-the-Hill tube station, Simon Feldman, a striking signal cabin rep from the RMT, said: ‘There is a lot more public support in this strike than the other strikes. It has really affected the...
THE latest WikiLeaks release of US documents reveals the essence of US diplomacy, and it stinks to high heaven with its intense imperialist antagonism towards the rest of the planet, which is held to be getting in the way of the interests of US imperialism and has to be...
The Unite union for British Airways’ 11,000 cabin crew, yesterday confirmed that a fresh ballot for strike action at BA is soon to get underway. At a press briefing, Unite joint general secretary Tony Woodley spelt out: ‘BA’s continued hounding of union members leaves us no other option but to...
‘The four-year Israeli siege on Gaza has resulted in the deaths of dozens of Palestinians suffering from health problems due to the lack of medication in Gazan hospitals,’ Palestinian rights groups revealed at the weekend. ‘This problem is worsened by the inability of Palestinians to travel abroad for medical treatment,’...
ED Miliband’s speech to the National Policy Forum was devoted to the theme that Labour, while ‘going beyond’ the completely discredited open worship of bankers and bosses favoured by Blair (New Labour), would nevertheless continue the Blair tradition of seeing its electoral role as winning the support of the...
New private health company ‘The Practice’ has taken over ChilversMcCrea Ltd to form a group that now runs 50 GP practices in England and Wales with more than 150,000 NHS patients. Peter Watts, chief executive of The Practice, told GPs magazine Pulse that the company was discussing dozens of potential...
The President and the General Secretary of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) have urged people to join today’s national demonstration in Dublin, ‘to make their voices heard and insist on a say in shaping their future.’ The national demonstration leaves from Wood Quay to the historic site of...
IT IS well known that the desire of the Zionist ruling class in Israel to expand the area under its rule is unquenchable, and that it has a special obsession with establishing facts on the ground as a prelude to a land-grabbing agreement, after arguing that these facts on...
HUNDREDS of thousands of university, college and school students demonstrated in towns and cities all over Britain on Wednesday. They were protesting against the Tory-LibDem Coalition government’s plans to increase tuition fees to £9,000 per year, withdraw funding for many subjects and abolish Education Maintenance Allowance. In London, police stopped...
LEN McCluskey, winner of the election for the post of Unite general secretary, said on Wednesday that ‘I have a huge agenda in front of me . . . ‘Let me just mention a couple of the major points on that agenda. Firstly, working people are under massive...
TEN universities remained occupied yesterday, including an historic building at Oxford University, while a national ‘student strike’ was called for next Tuesday, November 30. Students occupied the Radcliffe Camera in Oxford at lunchtime on Wednesday, during the National Day of Action by students against £9,000 tuition fees, the abolition of...
Education Secretary Gove ‘has launched a vicious assault on teachers’ commitment and professionalism’, said NASUWT general secretary Chris Keates yesterday. This is ‘to deflect from an agenda of savage cuts and elitism and its free market ideology,’ she said. Commenting on Gove’s statement to MPs on the publication of the Education...
TENS of thousands of school, college and university students demonstrated against education cuts, tuition fees and the scrapping of the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) in nearly every town and city all over Britain yesterday. Scores of colleges and universities were occupied as students called for fees to be abolished. Riot police...
Earlier this week the Coalition government’s Housing Minister, Grant Shapps, unveiled the government’s plans to destroy the last vestige of affordable social housing. In what housing charities have described as being ‘like a deliberate attack on the poor’, Shapps announced the introduction of a new ‘local authority flexible tenancy’. Under this scheme...
TEACHER and public sector unions have angrily rebutted attacks contained in the Ofsted Annual Report published on Tuesday. The report claimed that teaching in 50 per cent of secondary schools inspected in the past year and 43 per cent of primary schools was no better than satisfactory. Pupils are facing too...
TODAY will see the second wave of student anger against the Tory government’s decision to treble tuition fees from around £3,000 to £9,000 a year, which is supported by their Lib Dem coalition partners. The plan to raise tuition fees stems directly from the economic crisis of capitalism and the...
The Palestinian National Authority (PNA) government in the West Bank on Monday called on Israel to end all expansion of settlements as a necessary step toward renewing peace negotiations. The PNA cabinet chaired by Prime Minister Salam Fayyad said in a declaration: ‘Halting settlement activities completely in the Palestinian territories...
SEVERAL universities were being occupied yesterday, on the eve of today’s National Day of Action against the introduction of £9,000-a-year tuition fees and the abolition of Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA). Hundreds of thousands of students are expected to take part in today’s action, with demonstrations, walk-outs, rallies and pickets in...
‘NO one can deny this is the biggest economic crash – eclipsing 1914 and the 1929 Wall Street crash. And this crisis is driving forwards world revolution.’ That was the message brought by Young Socialists March for Jobs leader Jonty Leff to the News Line Anniversary and Leon Trotsky Memorial...
Homeless charity Shelter yesterday condemned the planned ‘radical reform’ of council housing as ‘a deliberate attack on the poorest in society’. Announcing the measure, housing minister Grant Shapps attacked ‘a lazy consensus about the use of social housing’. He announced plans for evicting new council house tenants after two...
LAST Sunday’s News Line Anniversary meeting, which greeted the Young Socialists’ March for Jobs and Free Education, was a historic moment in the history of the Workers Revolutionary Party and the struggle for Marxist leadership in the working class. The young marchers, who spoke and led the rally, reflected the...
IRISH TUC leader David Begg said on Saturday ‘It appears that the day of reckoning has arrived. The barbarians are at the gates.’ He was referring to the arrival of European Central Bank and IMF officials to open up and study the books of the Irish government, in...
‘The working class saw our march and lifted it up on their shoulders,’ Young Socialists marcher Paul Lepper told an audience of 250 youth and workers at the News Line Anniversary Rally in east London yesterday. The rally marked the culmination of the Young Socialists March for Jobs and Free...
Over 10,000 workers and youth on Saturday marched through central London against the Afghan war, calling for the troops to be brought out now. Organised by the Stop the War Coalition and CND, it was led by some of the Military Families Against the War, including ex-soldier Joe Glenton who...
Most UK troops ‘thought it was a lost cause ten years ago’, ex-soldier Joe Glenton told a Westminster press conference yesterday before handing back his Veteran’s Badge Medal to Downing Street as a protest against the Afghan war. Glenton was jailed for nine months for refusing to serve in an...
THE declaration by Tory grandee, Lord Young – a key member of the Thatcher and Major governments that fought the NUM and supported Murdoch’s year-long war that closed down Fleet Street, before shutting down the entire mining industry – that the vast majority of people in the UK have...
THE Young Socialists March for Jobs and Free State Education started the day yesterday with an effective early morning campaign outside the Luton GMM plant. Then, after breakfast, the marchers headed off on the road towards Watford on the last but one leg of the three week long march. They included...
OVER 40,000 students and workers demonstrated in Athens last Wednesday on the 37th anniversary of the Polytechnic students’ Uprising of November 17, 1973, which led to the overthrow of the military junta. Mass marches took place in Salonica, Patras and in all the other major Greek cities. At the front...
‘Reinstate Sian’ demanded a lobby, by over a dozen female firefighters and supporters, of the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority (LFEPA) yesterday. The Fire Brigades Union (FBU) is demanding the reinstatement of station manager Sian Griffiths, only days after she received the Queen’s Fire Service Medal. The...
LABOUR’S Shadow Chancellor has declared that it is time for the Labour Party to completely dump the union bloc vote in future leadership elections. Johnson, who got his career in parliament thanks to the support of his union, shares the Blair dream of severing the Labour Party completely from...
FIREFIGHTERS in their thousands rallied at Westminster Hall on Wednesday to hear union leaders call for stepping up the campaign against vicious cuts to fire services which the FBU says will endanger the lives of both firefighters and the public. Julian Gifford, FBU Finchley, said: ‘My real beef is...
IRISH Minister for Finance, Brian Lenihan, and the Irish government, are being forced onto their knees by the EU and the European Central Bank (ECB). Lenihan yesterday reacted to claims that Ireland, by earlier refusing an EU aid package of some 90bn euros was torpedoing the Euro, and undermining the...
THE copper-mining strike by 1,551 members of Sindicato de los Trabajadores de Collahuasi in Chile enters its second week today, with miners emboldened by both fervent loyalty among union ranks and knowledge that company rhetoric concerning ongoing production is a deception for the benefit of world copper markets. The company...
The Young Socialists March for Jobs set out from Northampton for Bedford yesterday morning. The marchers sent out an advance team to recruit new members before the main body of the march arrived. In Bedford market, they spoke to Leo Musharu, who is studying electrical and electronic engineering at Bedford College. He...
SEVERAL thousand firefighters from all over Britain, lobbied Parliament yesterday, to give notice that they and their union would not accept a 25 per cent cut to fire services and the sacking of 7,000 fire fighters nationally. Matt Wrack, Fire Brigades Union leader, said at the rally in Westminster Hall...
YESTERDAY’S announcement by the coalition government that it has agreed to make huge payments to former detainees at the notorious Guantanamo Bay concentration camp is designed to bring the lid down on any further exposures of the British state’s role as one of the world’s main torturers. The payment...
The BRITISH government is to pay millions of pounds in compensation to around a dozen British torture victims and former Guantanamo Bay detainees, it was announced yesterday. The payments are being made in order to avoid the exposure of thousands of documents in open court, giving details of how Britain...
THE demand for union representation is growing amongst workers in the United States. Loyola University catering workers rejoiced on November 2nd, after they received news that their employer, Aramark, agreed to recognise a workers’ union if a majority expresses interest in joining. Aramark has also agreed to remain neutral throughout the...
‘THIS government will either bring the country to its knees or we will stand up and oppose them and bring them to their knees!’ That was the message delivered to members of the Young Socialists March for Jobs by Unison Northampton County Branch Secretary Steve Bennett yesterday. At a reception at...
HOSPITAL workers, patients, and local residents in Enfield, said yesterday they would join the march through Enfield on December 4th to stop the closure of Chase Farm Hospital. They were speaking at the North East London Council of Action picket of the hospital. People were angry at the announcement that plans...
The Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) is urging all workers and youth to take part in a national demonstration on November 27 in Dublin, in defence of jobs, wages and services. ICTU President Jack O’Connor said: ‘The government has promised the harshest budget since the foundation of the state...