Monthly Archives: January 2011
The regime of Hosni Mubarak is finished, crushed by the millions of workers, middle class, poor and – most importantly – the youth who poured onto the streets of Egypt demanding an end to the 30 years of corruption and poverty that have characterised it. Everything Mubarak has attempted to quell this...
THE 250 migrant workers, on hunger strike since last Tuesday in Athens, have been forced to abandon the University of Athens Law School hall following a massive police operation on Thursday night. They have been rehoused at an empty private mansion close to Athens Polytechnic, where they are...
TEN thousand workers and youth marched through the centre of Manchester to a rally in Platts Fields on Saturday, against the Tory-Lib Dem coalition’s savage cuts programme and for jobs and free education for youth, with demands being made for Cameron and Clegg to be brought down and for...
Tens of thousands of defiant Egyptian workers and youth yesterday remained in control of the centre of Cairo, during a sixth day of protests demanding the end of President Hosni Mubarak and his brutal regime. Two air force jets and a helicopter flew low over Tahrir (Liberation) Square, the main...
TEACHING unions on Thursday slammed the government’s Education Bill. The NASUWT said it was a Bill that ‘has all the hallmarks of being conceived by power junkies’ and the NUT warned it ‘rides roughshod over the premise of a democratically accountable education system’. Chris Keates, General Secretary of the NASUWT, said:...
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak called on the army to take charge of security along with the riot police after hundreds of thousands of Egyptians took to the streets of Cairo, Port Suez, Alexandria, Giza and other cities yesterday. Workers throughout Egypt defied the over 300,000 special riot police who had...
THE TUC met yesterday afternoon to discuss pay and pensions and the planned mass demonstration and day of action on March 26 against the Tory-led coalition cuts due in March. Before the meeting it was made quite clear by the leaders of the unions that industrial action was very...
‘The TUC is mounting a wide campaign against these mistaken policies,’ said TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber yesterday, after a special TUC meeting called to discuss the trade unions’ industrial response to the effects of government spending cuts. Barber said: ‘The government’s agenda is doing huge damage to the economy...
NHS London has given the go-ahead for plans to close Chase Farm Hospital A&E and the consultant-led Maternity and Paediatrics departments, despite massive opposition from staff, patients and local residents. An NHS London press release on Wednesday said the health authority ‘today agreed with a review led by GPs in...
THE State of the Union speech by President Obama was all about the theme that the only thing that can save the crisis-ridden US ruling class and US capitalism was cooperation between Democrats and Republicans. In doing so, he served notice that his period of flirtation with the trade unions,...
NEARLY three hundred migrant workers, almost all of north African origin, have been on a mass hunger strike in Greece since Tuesday demanding: ‘the legalisation of all migrant workers living in Greece today.’ About 240 migrant workers have been given shelter in an unused hall of the Law School of...
‘THIS response details the BMA’s position on the specific areas for reform contained in the consultation Liberating the NHS: Greater choice and control, building on the views set out in our previous consultation responses. We trust our comments will be considered and used to develop the proposals in a...
THE governor of the Bank of England, in his Tuesday night speech detailed the source of the gigantic inflationary rise in living costs that has pauperised the working class, and slashed its living standards. He stressed that this must continue if there is to be any ‘recovery’ for...
The following motion was passed by a large majority at the BMA (British Medical Association) Council meeting in London yesterday. ‘This meeting recognises that legislation in the new Health and Social Care Bill is introducing a market of competing health care providers which will increase the private commercial provision of...
BANK of England Governor King’s insistence that nothing must be done to prevent the squeeze in living standards down to 1920s levels, has been met with strike warnings from trade union leaders. King told assembled bankers and businessmen at the Civic Centre, Newcastle on Tuesday night, that pay rates...
THE chairman of the BMA’s GP committee has warned that the Tory-LibDem government’s health plans will leave poor, elderly, infirm and terminally ill patients out, while the wealthy will be able to ‘shop around’ and demand the ‘right’ to see the doctor of their choice. The British Medical Association’s Laurence...
THE UK capitalist economy slumped in the fourth quarter of 2010, contracting by 0.5 per cent, instead of the meagre 0.5 per cent growth that was expected. ‘Weakness’ in the construction and services sectors were blamed. Activity in the construction sector contracted by 3.3 per cent. Services, Britain’s biggest...
Nurses and Midwives have strongly criticised the Health and Social Care Bill published last week, calling it a toxic prescription for patients and a re-organisation too far for NHS staff, said public sector union Unison on Monday. In a highly charged meeting of Unison’s Nursing and Midwifery Committee, the members...
The leak of confidential documents covering the ‘peace’ negotiations between the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) and Israel reveals starkly the bankruptcy and futility of any attempt to negotiate a settlement with the Zionist entity. These Palestinian documents, running into thousands of pages and going back over a decade of talks...
‘The historic printers’ strike set the scene for a struggle, not just against Murdoch but the whole capitalist state,’ All Trades Unions Alliance national secretary, Dave Wiltshire, told an audience of over 200 workers and youth on Sunday. He was opening a powerful 25th anniversary meeting of the heroic 1986-87...
A Judicial Review into the government’s decision to scrap the Building Schools for the Future scheme opened yesterday at the Royal Courts of Justice. Six councils are urging the High Court to overturn the government’s decision to scrap Building Schools for the Future schemes in their areas. More than 700 rebuilds...
ANGRY Palestinians demonstrated against French Foreign Minister Michèle Alliot-Marie as she visited Gaza on Friday over a ‘war crimes’ quote attributed to her by Israel’s public radio. The foreign minister, on her first visit to the enclave since taking over the post in November, was met by angry protesters as...
AFTER the resignation of the Foreign Minister and four other members of the Irish cabinet, the Prime Minister, Cowen has resigned as the leader of the main government party, Fianna Fail, and tomorrow his government faces a vote of confidence in the Irish parliament. It had a majority of...
OVER 200 workers and youth took part in a powerful 25th anniversary meeting of the heroic 1986-87 printers strike at St Bride’s Institute yesterday. A special tribute was paid to those who died, including cartoonist Tony Hall and former print union militant John Breen. The first to address the meeting was...
ON Saturday, March 16, the printers and their supporters replied to this attack on their picket line with a mass picket of 7,000. Again the police cavalry charged, injuring men and women. The month of March also saw the other newspaper owners jump in behind Murdoch with a wave of sackings. At...
Tony Blair yesterday claimed at the Chilcot Inquiry that he ‘regrets deeply and profoundly the loss of life’ in Iraq since the 2003 invasion. His words were greeted with cries of ‘too late’ and jeers from the Iraq Inquiry’s public gallery. Blair repeated his 2003 warning about the alleged ‘looming’ threat...
THE resignation of Coulson yesterday as Prime Minister David Cameron’s Director of Communications, follows on, almost immediately, from the police being forced to re-open the criminal investigation into illegal phone tapping by the News of the World. Ever since these illegal activities came to light in 2007 with the jailing...
NOT only the print unions got dragged before the Courts. In February 1986 the postal workers union (UCW) was hauled before the judge who ruled that the refusal of postal workers to deliver 23 million Sun bingo cards was illegal. The UCW executive, to their shame, capitulated and forced their...
THE rail union RMT yesterday called off the Docklands Light Railway 48-hour strike after it was declared illegal by the judiciary. In a message to members, RMT general secretary Bob Crow said: ‘You may be aware that instead of dealing with the problems you are experiencing in respect of the...
THE ARAB leaders meeting on Wednesday at an economic summit in Egypt’s resort of Sharm el-Sheikh expressed ‘fears’ that poverty, unemployment and recession, coupled with rapidly rising world food prices had produced impossible conditions for Arab workers and youth, who were now being driven into revolutionary uprisings. The bourgeois leaders,...
LANSLEY’S Health Bill is a disaster of ‘Titanic proportions’ warned Unison, the UK’s largest union, yesterday. The union is calling on the government to heed warnings from health professionals, MPs, staff, patients, charities, think-tanks and unions that the massive upheaval will destabilise the NHS. It will turn it into...
UK unemployment rose by 49,000 to almost 2.5 million in the three months to the end of November, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has reported. Twenty-three per cent of 16 to 24-year-olds are now out of work, after a rise of 32,000 to 951,000 without jobs, the highest figure...
‘THAT courage is required for a turnout, often indeed much loftier courage, much bolder, firmer determination than for an insurrection, is self-evident.’ ‘It is, in truth, no trifle for a working-man who knows want from experience, to face it with wife and children, to endure hunger and wretchedness for...
Staff and patients at Chase Farm Hospital, Enfield, yesterday showed their support for an occupation to stop the closure of its accident and emergency, maternity and paediatrics departments. Cars hooted and local residents also welcomed the North East London Council of Action monthly picket outside the north London hospital. Nurse Patricia...
THE government revealed yesterday that inflation shot up in December with CPI inflation reaching 3.7% (up from 3.3%), and the RPI rate, which includes mortgage costs, reaching 4.8% (up from 4.7%). Neither constitutes the real inflation rate, that is the rate of the rocketing price of the basic necessities...
Banning NHS operations to save money will gamble with patients’ health, the president of the Royal College of Surgeons warned yesterday. John Black, one of the UK’s most senior medical figures spoke as the government’s health and social care bill for England was made public. The ‘NHS is gambling with patients’...
inflation leapt in December with the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) rising to 3.7 per cent, up from 3.3 per cent in November, and the Retail Prices Index (RPI) – which includes mortgage interest payments – hitting 4.8 per cent from 4.7 per cent. Statistics from the Office for National Statistics...
The coalition government will be forced to accept this month that the bank bailout has more than doubled the size of the Public Debt to a level never seen before. The £1.5 trillion used to prop up the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and the Lloyds banking group will send...
The Palestinians have turned down a US request to avoid seeking a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, the chief PLO negotiator said on Sunday. Saeb Erekat said: ‘The Americans don’t want anything to be submitted to the Security Council, but we insist that we...
The scale and pace of the government’s planned NHS ‘reforms’, combined with £20bn cuts, is ‘extremely risky and potentially disastrous, warned the leaders of six health unions yesterday. Ahead of the new Health Bill’s publication tomorrow, they wrote in a letter to the Times newspaper: ‘Radical reform of the NHS...
Thousands of Jordanians took to the streets of Amman and other cities on Friday to protest against soaring commodity prices, unemployment and poverty, calling for the sacking of the government, as the revolutionary movement in North Africa spread to the Middle East. Amid a heavy police presence, demonstrators in the...
NHS managers have warned in a report from the NHS Confederation that the Lansley NHS White Paper will lead to hospital closures and constitutes an ‘enormous risk’ to UK health care. As well as hospital closures, the Tory privatisation plan will bring in treatment rationing and lower standards...
Hospitals could face closure to make space for private providers, warns a new report from the NHS managers’ organisation. Ahead of the publication on Wednesday of the government’s Health and Social Care Bill, the NHS Confederation warns that the biggest restructuring of the service since its creation in 1948 is...