Monthly Archives: December 2010
THE News Line Editorial Board sends its revolutionary greetings for the New Year of 2011 to all of our readers and to the working class and the poor of the world. 2011 will see the working class of the world, in the fourth year of the capitalist...
The Israeli Security Agency, Shin Bet is preventing as many as 90 per cent of Palestinian prisoners from consulting with an attorney, even though civilian and military legislation state clearly that such prohibition should be rarely applied, a study published recently reported. The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel and...
The leader of Scotland’s doctors has yesterday warned that a series of direct attacks on the medical workforce is testing the goodwill of the profession. In his New Year message, Dr Brian Keighley, Chairman of the BMA in Scotland, said: ‘The NHS should not bear the responsibility for the failings...
‘WORKING people in the UK can help stop the Conservative-led coalition from taking a wrecking ball to the fabric of daily life.’ This is the New Year’s message from the GMB, Unison and Unite, who organise some 3.5 million members, and by themselves make up a majority of the total...
‘FEBRUARY 25, 1848, had granted the republic to France, June 25 thrust the revolution upon her. And revolution, after June, meant: overthrow of bourgeois society, whereas before February it had meant: overthrow of the form of government.’ So began the second part of Marx’s analysis of the crucial class...
THE news last week that more than 100 cities in the United States are set to go bankrupt in the new year spells complete disaster for the world’s largest capitalist economy. Cities and states in the US owe a staggering $2 trillion, and financial analysts are saying quite bluntly that with...
Brendan Barber, general secretary of the TUC, and other trade union leaders met secretly with David Cameron last week, the first such meeting between the TUC and a Tory government for 25 years. The thin veneer of justification for entering into talks with Cameron lies in the position adopted by...
FREDERICK Engels was also thinking and writing at that time about the permanent revolution. This showed itself even as early as January 1849, when he wrote in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung about the revolutionary battle that had erupted in Hungary against Austrian rule. Highly commending the national uprising ‘armed,...
‘We don’t comment on leaked documents but our concerns remain about the competitive elements in the government’s NHS reforms,’ a British Medical Association (BMA) spokeswoman told News Line yesterday. She was referring to a leaked September letter from government advisers, the Independent Challenge Group warning that the coalition’s planned reforms,...
BY MIKE DRIVER PART ONE: ‘Fraternity found its true unadulterated and prosaic expression in the war of Labour against capital’ AS French and European workers are once again striking and demonstrating in their millions, at the same time singing the Internationale under conditions where fellow workers across the continent and...
Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) member Paul Fisher dropped a Christmas bombshell yesterday. He revealed that the Bank’s policymakers would like to see a tenfold hike in the current 0.5 per cent bank rate to reach a ‘normalised’ level of about five per cent. The Bank has left its...
HOMEOWNERS should prepare for interest rates of five per cent, a 1000 per cent leap from the current 0.5 per cent Bank of England interest rate. This was the advice on Sunday from Bank of England Markets Chief Paul Fisher, who also doubles as a member of the bank’s...
CABLE, the man who was threatening the ‘nuclear option’ of walking out of the Tory-led coalition, has meanwhile grovelled to his Tory betters. This was after being seduced by the Telegraph ‘honey trap’ into speaking the ‘unthinkable’ as far as the bourgeoisie is concerned, that he, as Business Secretary, was...
‘Without any prior public consultation, Suffolk county councillors have rushed through plans to sell-off the Ipswich fire control centre and get emergency fire calls answered outside the county’, the FBU said on Tuesday. It added that this came ‘on the same day the government killed off deeply-flawed plans to introduce...
BRITAIN’S budget deficit swelled to a new record level last month leading bourgeois analysts to warn that the financial speculators are getting the jitters. Public sector borrowing hit a fresh record high in November, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) reported yesterday. Net borrowing totalled £23.3 billion last month, up from...
THE Tory-led coalition’s public sector debt for November has shot up to £23.3 billion, £5.9 billion more than the figure for November 2009. It is the highest monthly figure since records began, and is extremely bad news for the government, meaning that it will have to exact even more...
Not only did Congress give zillionaires billions of dollars in tax breaks, they also told the people at the bottom of the economic ladder, ‘tough luck’, said the AFL-CIO trade union federation. It reports that with unemployment at nearly 10 per cent and 19 million Americans currently living in ‘deep...
Voting papers have been sent to more than 10,000 BASSA (British Airways Stewards and Stewardesses Association) members of Unite for a fresh strike ballot at the airline. Tony Woodley, Unite joint general secretary, said yesterday: ‘When this dispute started, the issue was making savings to help the company through a...
Secret US embassy cables published by WikiLeaks last Friday allege that the Rajapaksa government in Sri Lanka is complicit in abduction, murders and child trafficking carried out by renegade Tamil paramilitaries. One cable dated Friday, May 18 2007, from ‘Secret Section 01 of 06 Colombo 000728’, Subject: Sri Lanka:...
WRITING in yesterday’s Guardian newspaper the general secretary elect of Unite, Len McClusky, was forced to use the dread words ‘general strike’ in the context of defending the welfare state against the Tory-led coalition’s ‘unprecedented assault’ on the working class. Before anyone gets too carried away with this more militant...
TUC general secretary Brendan Barber led a delegation of union leaders to meet with Tory-LibDem coalition prime minister Cameron yesterday midday. In a press statement, Barber said: ‘The UK is currently in the grips of a bleak midwinter. ‘Today we warned the Prime Minister that next...
The Greek Prime Minister Yiorghos Papandreou, speaking at a meeting of his party’s parliamentary deputies on Saturday, emphasised that ‘no-one likes emergency procedures but we are at war’. Papandreou has been criticised severely by opposition parties and by several of his deputies for adopting emergency parliamentary procedures in pushing through...
The National Union of Teachers (NUT), Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) and the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) have produced a joint document, calling for the scrapping of SATS tests. They call for ‘an end to the excessive, confused and overlapping test and exam-based accountability system in England’. The...
THE Greek Socialist Party Prime Minister, Yiorghos Papandreou, told his party’s parliamentary deputies last Saturday that ‘no one likes emergency procedures but we are at war’. Papandreou was defending the huge cuts that he has been forcing onto the backs of the working class and the middle class to...
The deepening eurozone crisis is a threat to Britain’s just rescued banks, the Bank of England warns in its latest Financial Stability Report out yesterday. British banks have a £210bn exposure to Spanish and Irish debt. Another £288bn is in German and French debt, which may be under threat if the...
THE Thatcherite dream of creating a nation of home owners is already a nightmare for millions struggling to make their mortgage repayments. It is set to become a full-blown meltdown in the New Year, according to the Bank of England. In its ‘Financial Stability Report’ issued yesterday, the bank warned...
A HUGE march of over 100,000 workers and students held in Athens last Wednesday afternoon, as part of a 24-hour general strike, was viciously attacked by the Greek riot police who showered marchers with teargas canisters. The one-day general strike was called by the GSEE (Greek TUC) against the...
UNEMPLOYMENT is set to rocket, over and just after Christmas, when up to 100,000 public sector workers are to get their redundancy notices so that they can be legally sacked at the start of the new financial year on April 1st. In fact, unemployment has now risen to 2.5 million,...
UP to a thousand postal workers rallied at Westminster Hall on Wednesday to hear CWU union leaders and MPs call for a campaign against the privatisation of Royal Mail. The Postal Services Bill, which is going through Parliament, would see wholesale closures of Post Offices around the country, the union...
‘Public sector job losses are coming thick and fast. Councils in particular are bringing forward job losses in order to cope with the deep budget cuts that take effect next April.’ That was the warning made by Brendan Barber, the general secretary of the TUC, after it was revealed yesterday...
WIKILEAKS founder Julian Assange was finally released from prison yesterday, to loud cheers from a crowd who had gathered to show their support for him outside the High Court in London. An appeal against his bail was heard at the High Court yesterday morning, but the Swedish authorities said the...
‘EXPOSING war crimes is no crime! – Free Julian Assange!’ shouted over 100 demonstrators opposite Westminster Magistrates’ Court on Tuesday, demanding his immediate release from custody. ‘Justice for Julian! – free Julian Assange now!’, ‘Julian Assange should do no time! – Telling the truth is no crime!’, they continued, opposing...
Health Secretary Lansley’s decision to push ahead with the coalition’s massive attack on the NHS, in the teeth of fierce opposition, is ‘a big mistake’, warned public sector union Unison yesterday. The union is ‘disgusted’ at the government’s ‘failure to stick to its election pledge of no more top-down...
The latest official unemployment figures published yesterday show an unexpected increase of 35,000 in the three months to October. The number of young people aged 16-24 out of work has reached 943,000. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said: ‘The unemployment rate for the three months to October 2010 was...
THE Council of Europe has named the Kosovo Prime Minister, Hashim Thaci, as a mafia leader who organised the sale of drugs and weapons throughout Europe, and oversaw the harvesting of the organs of Serb and other prisoners, and their sale to private overseas clinics. The prisoners...
THE North-East London Council of Action Christmas picket of Chase Farm Hospital got a very warm reception yesterday for its demand to occupy to stop the closure. Cars hooted and staff and patients stopped and took leaflets and signed up to the campaign. Bill Rogers, North East London Council of Action...
INFLATION is on the rise with the CPI rate increasing from 3.1 per cent to 3.2 per cent, while the RPI rate rose from 4.5 per cent to 4.7 per cent. This surge is on the eve of a 2.5 per cent increase in VAT in January – up...
GREEN and Black Cross (GBC) today launched the appeals and witness section of their website in an attempt to challenge police misconduct during student demonstrations over the recent weeks. The website contains pleas for information relating to incidents of police brutality. One girl who contacted GBC described how an officer ‘pulled...
Public Interest Lawyers (PIL) yesterday commenced a legal case against the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. They are challenging the unlawful imprisonment, through kettling of five people, including four sixth form students, at last Thursday’s student protests about tuition fees. PIL’s clients complain that they were kettled in Trafalgar Square for...
‘The Localism Bill, promoting the “Big Society” concept, is a smokescreen, so that thousands of local government jobs can be axed’, the Unite union warned yesterday. Unite, which has 250,000 members in the public sector, said that the Bill which heralds severe cuts to local authority spending, while at the...
YESTERDAY saw the Tory-led coalition finally unveil its so-called ‘Localism Bill’, which is central to its plans to make massive cuts in local government funding and sack hundreds of thousands of workers. Behind all the flannel about ‘localism’ and devolving power to local communities there lies the simple intent of...