Monthly Archives: March 2011
PALESTINIANS are commemorating Land Day, the 35th anniversary of the uprising against Israel’s land theft, in which six young protesters were killed by Israeli forces. However, confiscation of land and settlements are proceeding at a frantic pace. Israel’s ‘separation wall’ has confiscated around 733 square kilometres of occupied...
A LIVELY picket of both gates at Chase Farm Hospital took place on Tuesday, March 29. Beverley Stevens, a Unison support worker in Enfield Authority said: ‘I don’t agree with the closure of Chase Farm Hospital, the community needs emergency treatment, there’s too much traffic and it’s too far...
STRIKING teachers and other public sector workers marched through Camden and Tower Hamlets yesterday. The vibrant demonstration and rally of 500 Camden NUT members was supported by parents and students, along with other union members. The march was led by Camden Teachers Association, with banners from South Camden Community School, Haverstock,...
THE British government took petty revenge after its client ‘revolutionaries’ were driven out of Ras Lanuf and Bin Jawad by the Libyan armed forces yesterday, by announcing that five Libyan diplomats were to be expelled from the UK. The diplomats were labelled ‘security risks’ by Foreign Secretary Hague, who told...
TEACHERS’, Lecturers’ and Students’ Union leaders have warned that Education Secretary Gove’s announcement on Monday of a ‘bursary scheme’ to replace the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) still means a massive cut in funding for the poorest students. However, despite warning that ‘thousands of children will still be priced out of...
LAST Saturday’s 500,000-strong TUC demonstration against the coalitions cuts policy has shaken the coalition, and given the capitalist state a lot to think about. Such a huge mobilisation in the very early days of the struggle indicates that ahead, as the class struggle sharpens and becomes more angry and furious,...
HOSPITAL workers, patients and local residents in Enfield yesterday reaffirmed their determination to stop the planned closure of the A&E, Maternity and Paediatrics departments at Chase Farm Hospital. They welcomed the North-East London Council of Action monthly picket. North-East London Council of Action Secretary Bill Rogers told News Line: ‘We went...
Libyan government forces stopped the pro-imperialist assault on Muammar Gadaffi’s home town of Sirte and drove back the counter-revolutionary forces yesterday. A Pentagon spokesman in Washington, Vice-Admiral Bill Gortney, admitted that because the Libyan rebels were disorganised, any military gains that had been made for them by NATO airpower would...
‘THE crusader and colonial bombing campaign targeted inhabited areas in the city of Sabha at dawn on Monday, causing the destruction of several houses,’ Libyan TV reported yesterday. ‘Ambulances and firefighter teams rushed to those areas. ‘Officials at the Health Ministry in Sabha spoke of many casualties among civilians in those...
IT is now crystal clear that the Nato airforces are in Libya to blast a way through the Libyan people, both fighters and civilians, for the rag-bag of counter-revolutionaries in Benghazi who are willing to front a puppet Libyan regime for the imperialist powers. In recent days the forces...
Ceremonies and events honouring the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire – which killed 146 garment workers, most of them young women, and spurred the first nationwide call for workplace safety – continued yesterday morning. ‘We hope you will share this special AFL-CIO Now feature on the 100th anniversary...
OVER half a million trade unionists and youth from every town and city in Britain joined Saturday’s TUC march against the savage spending cuts. The March For The Alternative assembled near parliament on the Embankment as thousands and thousands of people streamed across the bridges over the River Thames. Stephen...
Prime minister Cameron has broken the coalition’s pledge to increase funding for the NHS, both Labour and the Institute of Fiscal Studies have warned. Labour’s shadow health secretary John Healey said yesterday that if the ‘double counting’ of social care budgets as NHS spending was taken into account, the NHS...
500,000 workers, youth and pensioners marched through London on Saturday. Unlike the Labour leaders they were in total opposition to all of the savage cuts that are being made on them, and the rest of the population, as the bankers and bosses continue to be cushioned and coddled. They were not...
Today’s massive London march against the coalition government will be the biggest since the two million-strong march against the Iraq war under the Blair government. There will be masses of trade unionists, youth and students marching from the Embankment to Hyde Park Corner. Yesterday, on the eve of the march, Public...
TODAY’S march called by the TUC is a massive demonstration of the anger and hatred felt by the working class, whole sections of the middle class, students and young people towards the Tory-LibDem coalition government and its policies. In Wednesday’s class war budget the chancellor, George Osborne, repeated the fiction...
MANCHESTER Metropolitan University (MMU) is under fire after its security forcibly evicted staff members from picket lines across the university’s buildings on Thursday morning. University and College Union (UCU) members at MMU were on strike as part of UK-wide action in a row over pensions, pay and jobs. The...
IT was the German anti-Nazi activist, Pastor Martin Niemöller, who said: ‘In Germany they first came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for...
‘AS we send this press release, Palestinian civilians across the occupied territories, including East Jerusalem, are encountering extremely violent waves of state-sponsored oppression along with aggression from Israeli-settlers, the latest of which is the killing of eight civilians, including three children, in Gaza as a result of launching aerial...
MEMBERS of the University and College Union (UCU) at around 500 colleges and universities across the UK took strike action yesterday against changes to their pensions, and pay cuts. The walk-out was over plans for greater pension contributions from staff and an increase in the pension age, against a...
THE Libyan Leader Muammar al-Gadaffi gave a televised address, live from his Tripoli’s compound of Bab al-Aziziyah on Tuesday night. The compound has already been bombed by the imperialists. Gadaffi said: ‘The new crusader battle has been launched by crusader countries on Islam. ‘Long live Islam everywhere. All Islamic armies...
HOSPITAL doctors at the BMA Consultants Conference yesterday voted with just three against to ‘ballot the consultant membership regarding all forms of industrial action’ if the government moves to scrap their final salary pension scheme and replace it with a career average scheme. Motion 41, from the Conference Agenda Committee,...
CHANCELLOR Osborne yesterday moved his ‘emergency budget’. He outlined the gravity of the situation by saying that ‘Questions that were asked about the liquidity and solvency of banking systems are now being asked of the liquidity and solvency of some of the governments that stand behind those...
INFLATION soared upwards last month, with the government’s preferred Consumer Prices Index (CPI) measure rising to 4.4 per cent, up from 4 per cent in January. The Office for National Statistics said the largest inflationary pressures came from basic working class needs. It said clothing and footwear costs rose by a...
British air and missile strikes have caused ‘numerous civilian casualties’ especially at the civilian airport in Sirte, Libyan government spokesman Ibrahim Moussa said yesterday. The Libyan naval base at Bussetta, about 10km (six miles) east of Tripoli, and a fishing village were also hit, while Muammar Gadaffi’s Tripoli compound...
THE UK CPI inflation rate rose to to 4.4% in February from the January figure of 4%, while the RPI inflation rate which includes housing costs rose to 5.5% from 5.1% in January. The Bank of England’s target inflation rate figure is 2%. The continuing rise in inflation is driven...
TONY Brown, University and College Union (UCU) president at University College London (UCL), told News Line on the Gower Street picket line yesterday morning: ‘Today, we’re taking action across England at all the pre-1992 universities in defence of the USS pension scheme. ‘The employers are trying to divide new scheme...
The Trades Union Congress (TUC) has gone through its ritual presentation of an ‘alternative’ budget in advance of the coalition government’s budget to be unveiled on Wednesday. At the heart of this alternative to the slash and cut policies of the coalition, the TUC is proposing absolutely nothing except to...
QATARI Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassem al-Thani, on Sunday, trying to defend his country’s participation in military operations against Libya, said the aim was to ‘stop the blood bath’. An international coalition began strikes in Libya with combat jets and cruise missiles on Saturday, aiming to stop Libyan leader...
‘DOWN, DOWN Cameron, Down, Down Sarkozy, Down Down Obama,’ chanted hundreds of angry Libyan students outside 10 Downing Street yesterday afternoon, holding up pictures of men, women and children slaughtered by the imperialist bombardment of their country which began on Saturday. TV crews were taken into Colonel Gadaffi’s compound in...
ANGLO-US-FRENCH forces have killed over 100 Libyans and wounded hundreds more in their opening onslaught of cruise missiles, launched from the sea, and bombs and missiles launched from the air. The imperialist war aim remains the overthrow of the Gadaffi regime and the installation of a regime of imperialist puppets,...
Arab League Secretary General Amr Musa yesterday issued a statement opposing the bombing of Libya. He said: ‘This is not imposing a no-fly zone. We proposed a no-fly zone to protect civilians, not for bombing more civilians.’ Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich also called for an end to the ‘indiscriminate...
A joint survey by public sector unions PCS and Unison of more than 10,000 public sector workers, reveals the shocking impact of the government’s cuts and pay freeze on family life across the UK. With budget day looming on Wednesday (23 March), the unions say that the results of the...
THE vote by the United Nations security council to impose and police a no-fly zone over Libya is a declaration of war by imperialism against the Libyan people and the entire Arab revolution. With its usual nauseating hypocrisy, the UN cloaked this decision in words dripping with concern about the...
THE Bahraini ruling class has arrested opposition leaders on charges including contact with foreign states and calling for the fall of the regime, said a military statement read out on state television on Thursday. ‘Several leaders of sedition who had called for the fall of the regime’ were arrested for...
Libyan Foreign minister Moussa Koussa yesterday announced: ‘My country will do its best to deal positively with this resolution’, in the wake of Thursday evening’s UN Security Council vote authorising military action against his country. He told a press conference: ‘The Jamariyah has now got knowledge of this resolution and...
IN ORDER that the universities can have their budgets slashed and be privatised or closed, students are to be charged up to £9,000 a year in fees. These are all to be paid back at commercial rates of interest, along with the loans that they will have had to...
The University and College union (UCU) yesterday welcomed findings by the BBC, which it said shone a light on the real level of debt students will face under the government’s new plans for student funding. The figures calculate that some graduates could end up paying back double their...
NINETY-THREE per cent of college principals are concerned that the abolition of the education maintenance allowance (EMA) will lead to a devastating drop in young people staying in education, according to a Unison and UCU survey. On Wednesday, the day the latest unemployment figures were released, a survey of more...
GUNTHER Oettinger, the EU’s energy commissioner, has compared the Japanese earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster – with its repeated explosions of nuclear material and the destruction of millions of people’s homes and lives – to an ‘apocalypse’ . He said: ‘We want the safety of all reactors to be reviewed...
The biggest gathering was in Gaza City, where officials from the Hamas-run interior ministry said vast crowds had packed into the city’s Square of the Unknown Soldier. As the protesters demanded that Hamas and Fatah movements patch up their differences, Gaza’s Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniya publicly invited his Fatah...
Students from BSix College in Hackney lobbied 10 Downing Street Wednesday morning to protest against the cuts to the EMA, along with Unison General Secretary Dave Prentis. College heads fear that as many as 90% of students will be out of education by September when the £30-a-week Education Maintenance Allowance...
UK unemployment has risen by 27,000 in the three months to the end of January to 2.53 million, the highest figure since 1994. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said yesterday that the jobless rate was now eight per cent, the highest since 1996. However, the ONS figures also showed that...
Public sector union Unison on Tuesday published a dossier of cuts hitting social work departments, warning that, together with existing shortages, cuts will put the lives of children and vulnerable adults at risk. The union said that cuts are slashing admin support, training and early intervention support work that social...
DOCTORS at the British Medical Association Special Representative Meeting yesterday morning voted unanimously to oppose the government’s Health and Social Care Bill, and demand that it is immediately withdrawn (see page 2). In the afternoon, there was a battle over the motion that Tory Health Minister Lansley must resign. Moving the...