Monthly Archives: November 2010
PRESSURE is being piled onto the Irish government to accept a further EU bail-out of between 60bn to 80bn euros, which will mean handing over control of the Irish economy and its finances to the European Central Bank (ECB), which would become the master of Ireland. This would leave a...
The United Nations and its partners have finalised the Cholera Inter-Sector Response Strategy for Haiti, a plan to support the Government of Haiti’s response to the current cholera epidemic, the UN Organisation for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported last Friday. An OCHA statement said: ‘The Strategy includes...
THE Young Socialists March for Jobs, now in the final week on its route from Manchester to London, left Rugby yesterday morning, heading for Northampton, winning strong support along the way. At one point, a group of school youth in their school yard started cheering the march in Rugby and...
REPUBLICANS on Capitol Hill want to extend the Bush-era tax cuts for the rich, which are set to expire at the end of the year. President Obama and congressional Democrats want to extend the cuts for middle and lower income families, but not for persons making $250,000 or more. The...
IT’S official. The western imperialist states are engaged in a ‘war against terror’, which they have been waging since the Bush-Blair axis was formed after September 11 2001, that they cannot win, and which, by definition are bound to lose, unless they can reach an accommodation with their opponents. The...
THE YS March for Jobs set off yesterday from Coventry after winning great support when they stayed there on Saturday night. Coventry Unison’s branch administrator, Chris Coleman, came out into the city’s main square to bring the support of her branch to the marchers. ‘I met you on the big demonstration...
Trade unions on Thursday gave their reaction to Work and Pensions Secretary Duncan Smith’s announcement of a ‘three strikes and you’re out’ ‘claimant contract’, whereby the unemployed will lose their Jobseekers Allowance for up to three years. The Public and Commercial Services union (PCS) said: ‘The government’s plans to increase...
THE meeting of the G20 group – the 20 leading countries in the world – concluded in Seoul yesterday with the usual empty claims of saving the world capitalist economy. This summit was supposed to deal with the sharpening contradictions of world capitalism, an expression of which is the currency war...
The Young Socialists March for Jobs for Youth and Free State Education leaves the Bullring in central Birmingham at 9am this morning. It is setting off on the Birmingham to Coventry leg of their march from Manchester to London. The YS marchers are spending Sunday campaigning in Coventry before marching on...
OVER 100,000 students from all parts of Britain joined a massive demonstration against tuition fees in Westminster on Wednesday. The march called by the National Union of Students (NUS) and the University and College Union (UCU) quickly filled Whitehall after assembling near Trafalgar Square. There were loud boos and hisses as...
THE Young Socialists March for Jobs and Free State Education marched from Wolverhampton to Birmingham yesterday. And last night they were staying at the Irish Centre in Birmingham, and were having dinner and a shower, both organised for them by the GMB union in the city. Today, students from Birmingham...
Unemployed workers face being refused benefits for up to three years if they don’t take up job offers, or ‘community placements’ under a new ‘claimant contract’, announced by Work and Pensions Secretary, former army officer Duncan Smith yesterday. Downing Street officials have said the new claimant contract will come into...
EX-ARMY officer Duncan Smith, the Coalition’s Work and Pensions Secretary, yesterday announced a Universal Credit to replace all benefits, and also a ‘claimants contract’ for the unemployed. The ‘contract’ will allow the state to remove benefit for up to three years if a person refuses...
OVER 100,000 students, lecturers and college youth filled the streets of Westminster yesterday, in a massive demonstration against the Tory-Lib Dem coalition’s announcement of £9,000 a year tuition fees. They also demonstrated their opposition to the scrapping of the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) and warned that students were being made...
BANK OF ENGLAND Governor King looked into his teacup yesterday morning at his press conference and all he could see was leaves, leaving him none the wiser about what was about to happen to British capitalism. Clinging onto a tiny increase in GDP he said: ‘In the past year, our...
THE International Crisis Group, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, the three premier human rights watchdogs, yesterday slammed Sri Lanka’s reconciliation commission (LLRC). They accused the commission of failing to ‘meet basic international standards for independent and impartial inquiries’, and for ‘proceeding against a backdrop of government failure to address...
TENS of thousands of students and youth are marching today in central London to denounce the tripling of tuition fees to £9,000, and to demand the ending of tuition fees, the restoration of free state university education, and the cancelling of all of the savage cuts in the education...
The United Nations Stabilisation Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) said on Monday that Haitian authorities (the Direction de la Protection Civile – DPC) issued a red alert warning on November 3 in anticipation of the tropical depression ‘Tomas’. A MINUSTAH statement said: ‘The Haitian authorities have mobilised emergency operations centres and...
THE Young Socialists March for Jobs and Free State Education set off early yesterday for the latest leg from Stoke to Stafford. Hitting the road at 9.00am, the marchers received great support from passers-by for their slogans: ‘Education must be free! We won’t pay tuition fees!’, ‘Youth demand a future!...
THE long awaited public inquiry into the Mid-Staffordshire NHS Trust opened yesterday. It was in Mid-Staffs hospital that between 2005 and 2008 an estimated 400 patients died needlessly after receiving treatment there. Earlier investigations into this appalling death rate pinned the blame squarely on staff shortages, especially amongst nurses, in order to...
‘DESPITE the measures taken by the government to try to support the idea that ‘the page on retirement’ is turned, over 1.2 million workers demonstrated in 243 cities against the pension reform’ last Saturday, November 6th, declared the CGT trade union. The largest march, in Paris, drew about 90,000 people...
THE Young Socialists March for Jobs and Free State Education campaigned at Keele University yesterday, where students bought tickets for the Meet the March Rally on November 21 in London and many joined the Young Socialists. The university students union made the marchers very welcome, providing them with shower facilities...
THE Young Socialists March for Jobs for Youth and Free State Education reached Stoke last night, after a great weekend. The march has now completed its first week on the road and there are two weeks left before the Meet the Marchers News Line-Trotsky Anniversary Rally at Queen Mary College...
THE Coalition’s Duncan Smith, an ex-army officer, is proposing to discipline the unemployed with forced slave labour, as part of the Coalition’s plan to destroy the Welfare State. The Coalition is planning to get rid of over 500,000 public sector workers with its savage cuts programme, and unemployment is set...
Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith yesterday revealed plans to force unemployed benefit claimants into slave labour. TUC senior policy officer Richard Exell said the policy would be ‘very unfair to unemployed people, especially long-term unemployed people’. On Radio 4’s World This Weekend, he said: ‘The reason we have got...
THE Young Socialists March for Jobs and Free State Education from Manchester to London is campaigning in Stoke today, before moving on to Stafford. Speaking to the marchers yesterday morning in Mansfield, retired NUM member John Wilson said: ‘There should have been a general strike during the miners’ strike of...
The YS March for Jobs and Free State Education marched for 17 miles from Sheffield to Chesterfield yesterday. It is marching on to Mansfield and then Stoke over the weekend. The march had big successes in Sheffield. After receiving a £100 donation and a fish dinner from the GMB City Council branch...
Thousands of journalists across the BBC walked out at midnight Thursday in the first of two 48-hour strikes in protest at plans to devalue their pensions. The Today programme on Radio 4 was replaced with pre-recorded material, after presenters John Humphrys and Sarah Montague chose not to cross NUJ picket...
THE News Line salutes the London FBU membership which has stood firm in its defence of terms and conditions against a pre-planned massive onslaught by the employers, the government, the bourgeois press and the AssetCo scabs to enforce the submit-or-be-sacked diktat. FBU members have stood up against intimidation by...
GOLDSMITHS College students began an occupation of Deptford Old Town Hall, (now part of the university), on Wednesday afternoon – after the Tory-LibDem coalition announced plans to treble tuition fees to £9,000 a year. The students maintained their occupation overnight and said they planned to bring a mass contingent to...
The Fire Brigades Union yesterday gave an undertaking in the High Court not to hinder or intimidate emergency crews provided by private company AssetCo during today’s and tomorrow’s strike. London Fire Brigade had gone to court seeking an injunction but the matter was settled by agreement. John Cavanagh QC, representing London...
IRISH government plans to increase university fees from 1,500 euros to 2,500 euros led to Wednesday’s 40,000 strong students march in Dublin, and to clashes with the riot police guardians of Irish capitalism. The slogan of the students was ‘Education not Emigration!’ The latter is the traditional bourgeois solution to...
THE Young Socialists March for Jobs and Free State Education had a great day in Sheffield yesterday. The day started with the marchers splitting up into two campaign teams, one at the dole and the other at the university. At the dole the team recruited a new marcher. Josh Tow, aged 21,...
Medical students will be left almost £70,000 in debt under government plans to allow universities to charge up to £9,000 in tuition fees, the British Medical Association (BMA) warned on Wednesday. Proposals to reform higher education funding were announced on Wednesday by the Universities and Science Minister, David Willetts MP,...
MEDICAL students will be left almost £70,000 in debt under Government plans to allow universities to charge up to £9,000 in tuition fees, the BMA warned yesterday. Karin Purshouse, Chair of the BMA’s Medical Students Committee said: ‘The BMA estimates that if universities charge the £9,000 rate allowed under these...
The Campaign for Free and Fair Elections (CaFFE) in a statement has urged the Sri Lanka Department of Elections to implement a proper programme to register the persons above the age of eighteen now held in the detention centres in the North including Menik Farm, in the 2010 voters’...
The Young Socialists March from Manchester to London for Jobs and Free State Education reached Sheffield late yesterday afternoon after a massive reception in Glossop on Tuesday. Arriving in Glossop at dusk, drenched from having marched from Stockport in driving rain, the marchers were welcomed with home made hot soup...
ON August 31 the Labour Party called on the Coalition to end the speculation that Britain is considering sharing its aircraft carrier capability with France by creating a cooperation pact. The Ministry of Defence described the report as ‘speculation.’ Yesterday, barely two months later, the UK and French ruling...
A court hearing on a case about the torture of 142 Iraqis in UK detention opens this Friday, November 5th. Public Interest Lawyers (PIL) are acting for 142 Iraqi civilians who complain that at various times and in different UK facilities during the period from March 2003 to December 2008,...
YOUTH from Stockport College cheered as the YS March for Jobs and Free State Education set off on its latest leg from Stockport to Glossop yesterday. The march hit Glossop yesterday afternoon and is staying overnight in the Glossop Labour Club. Yesterday was another great day for the march, with...