Monthly Archives: April 2011
THE London Ambulance Service (LAS) announced yesterday that it plans to cut 890 jobs over the next five years. The LAS, which is making £53 million cuts over five years, said it is cutting 560 ‘frontline jobs’, with a further 330 posts removed from management and support services. Unison Regional Organiser...
Royal College of Nursing general secretary Dr Peter Carter yesterday condemned ‘billions of pounds’ of NHS cuts, with thousands of nursing jobs being axed, warning nurses are ‘talking of industrial action’. In his keynote address to the RCN Annual Congress in Liverpool, Dr Carter pledged: ‘I’m up for the...
On the eve of its annual conference the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) has produced damning evidence that explodes the lies that the savage cuts inflicted on the NHS by the Tory-LibDem coalition will not affect frontline services. Their survey of 21 NHS Trusts in England found that 54 per...
Yemeni protesters kept up the heat on President Ali Abdullah Saleh on Saturday as fresh clashes raged in the flashpoint city of Taiz, and as a dissident general denied aiming to replace the Yemeni leader. Yemen recalled its ambassador to Qatar, state news agency Saba announced, after a call from...
With anger over job cuts and NHS ‘reforms’ due to dominate the Royal College of Nursing’s Annual Congress in Liverpool this week, Andrew Lansley has declined to give the health secretary’s customary address to delegates. He is fearful of getting a hostile reception that could cost him his...
THE Egyptian army opened fire on thousands of workers and young people in Tahrir Square on Saturday morning, killing four and wounding 117. Present in the square were a group of revolutionary officers who stood alongside the demonstrators. Before the attack the military chiefs had warned a group of...
Thousands of Jobcentre Plus (JCP) call centre staff will strike on April 18 after bosses refused to improve working conditions and customer service, the Public and Commercial Services union announced yesterday. In a ballot of the union’s 7,000 members in JCP’s 37 call centres across the country, 70 per cent...
THURSDAY’S announcement that Portugal had finally been forced into asking for a massive 90 billion euro (£79 bn) bailout from the European Central Bank (ECB) means that it has now joined Ireland as the second EU state to have effectively declared itself bankrupt in the space of one month. Next...
THE GPs magazine Pulse has revealed that both the Royal College of GPs (RCGP) and the BMA’s GP Committee have been excluded from the panel which will oversee the two-month government ‘listening exercise’ in a bid to win round critics to its NHS reforms. Instead, former RCGP chair, Professor Steve...
BRITISH conscripts were sent out to Kenya in the 1950s, where they were turned into brutes and sadistic killers, in the war of British imperialism and its settlers against the Land Freedom Army (Mau Mau), who were fighting to regain the land that was stolen from them as well...
JULIANO Mer-Khamis, an Israeli film director and founder of the Freedom Theatre in Jenin refugee camp, was shot dead on Monday April 4th after leaving the theatre, according to witnesses and security sources. The 52-year old actor and director was shot five times in yet unknown circumstances. Prime Minister Salam Fayyad...
The UK government must take responsibility for the torture of Kenyans under the 1950s British colonial government, one of the survivors, 82-year-old Wambugu Wa Nyingi, told News Line outside the High Court yesterday. Nyingi said: ‘You can’t have a baby, then kill it and say you are not responsible.’ He and...
The following report was delivered by Nasim Ahmed to a Palestine Return Centre Workshop on Palestinian prisoners in London earlier this week. ‘I would like to thank the conference organisers for inviting me to deliver this paper. When I was first asked to speak at this conference I was...
ON March 15 at the historic Special Representative Meeting (SRM) of the BMA, which its Council was forced to call to decide on the BMA’s attitude to the Health and Social Care Bill, after rejecting the demand for a SRM on a number of occasions, its chairman Dr Hamish...
HEALTH unions Unison, Unite and the GMB have scornfully condemned the attempts of the Tory-LibDem coalition to involve the trade unions in new talks over the Health and Social Care NHS privatisation Bill. Tory-LibDem coalition leaders Cameron, Clegg and Health Secretary Lansley urged the unions to ‘join the debate’ on...
Unison general secretary, Dave Prentis, yesterday pledged the union will ‘fight and fight’ until the Health and Social Care Bill is defeated and the NHS is safe. Speaking at the union’s health conference in Liverpool, Prentis accused Health Secretary Lansley of throwing a ‘grenade right into the middle of healthcare...
ON Monday, the Tory Health Minister, Andrew Lansley, was forced to declare a ‘pause’ in the coalition government’s drive to privatise and smash up the NHS. Lansley made it quite clear in his speech that this ‘pause’ was not to stop this process, merely to take on board some minor...
Unison on Monday sent a file of hundreds of testimonies from health workers, patients and members of the public who care about the NHS, to Prime Minister Cameron and Deputy PM Clegg, on the eve of the union’s health conference. The testimonies shine a spotlight on what patients and health...
MORE than half of claimants surveyed by mental health charity Mind say fear of having their Incapacity Benefit removed has led them to have suicidal thoughts. One-and-a-half million Incapacity Benefit claimants began receiving letters yesterday instructing them to come to a test on their ability to work. Work and...
Yesterday, more than two million people on Incapacity Benefit found themselves officially labelled by the Tory-LibDem coalition as scroungers and parasites living off the ‘most abused benefit’ in the land. From that day those unable to work through ill-health will find their Incapacity Benefit scrapped and replaced with an Employment...
Unite, the biggest union in the UK and Ireland, yesterday called upon the governments of the UK, France and the US to halt the air attacks on Libya. Unite said that the intervention is a mistake and will provoke a lengthened civil conflict. An immediate cease-fire ought to be called...
Over 60 parents, children and their supporters from around the country staged a ‘Save Our Children’s Centres’ Mothers’ Day rally outside Downing Street yesterday morning. A petition of over 50,000 signatures against the national cuts to Sure Start children’s centres was handed to No.10 by several children who...
THE news this weekend that the private companies are bidding for 40 new welfare contracts represents another stage in the Tory-LibDem coalition’s relentless drive against the unemployed. These contracts, worth between £3bn - £5bn, are being parcelled out to private companies under the governments’ new ‘work programme’. These companies will supposedly...
Two international ‘contact groups’, one each to check Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) fund-raising and arms purchases, were initiated by the US in the first half of 2006, says an article on Friday, based on the US cables accessed by The Hindu newspaper through Wikileaks. A cable sent in...
Unison – the biggest health workers union – yesterday staged a picket of Chase Farm Hospital against the threat to close the hospital’s A&E, Maternity and Children’s departments, and in defence of jobs and against the privatisation of the NHS. Over 50 people took part in the demonstration to show...
THE Trades Union Congress yesterday condemned cuts to housing benefit and other vital support, as sweeping changes to the Welfare State began to take effect. ‘We are deeply concerned that with wages trailing behind the cost of living it is another hammer blow for hard-pressed families across the country,’ a...
Some 4,000 primary and secondary school teachers, from both state and private schools, plus state hospital doctors, short-contract workers of the Athens municipality, university and school students held a militant demonstration last Wednesday afternoon through the Greek capital’s city centre. The action was part of a national 24-hour teachers’...
THE latest stage in the complete disintegration of the Irish banking system was described by one analyst of the capitalist market as a ‘death spiral’ after the results of the new stress tests of Irish banks were revealed on Thursday. This opening of the banks’ books by the new Irish...
UNISON is holding a lunchtime demonstration outside the main entrance of Chase Farm Hospital between 12noon and 2pm today, as part of its All Together For The NHS Day – April 1st. The union is holding scores of demonstrations, rallies and lobbies of MPs all over the country today in...
‘NHS hospitals and their contents – including hundreds of thousands of beds, scanners, X-ray equipment, incubators, bedpans, syringes, operating theatre equipment, pacemakers, surgical instruments and stethoscopes – are up for sale as a result of the government’s Health and Social Care Bill,’ warned Unison yesterday. The union added in a...
Postal workers were hit last week with the announcement by Royal Mail that it is stepping up its closure plan for half of the country’s 64 mail centres with the loss of thousands of jobs. Two of London’s three mail centres, at Nine Elms in south London and the East...