Monthly Archives: June 2011
GAZA’S unemployment rate is among the world’s highest, at 45.2%, the UN has found. The territory continues to be blockaded by Israel, while the Egyptian military will not open the Rafah crossing to men aged between 18 and 40, who are being imprisoned in Gaza. Real wages in Gaza...
UNISON said on Monday that the NHS Future Forum’s report into the NHS Health and Social Care Bill, ‘shows a Bill beyond repair’. Even if the Government adopted all the report’s recommendations, ‘It is still the wrong Bill at the wrong time,’ warned Unison general secretary Dave Prentis. Unison stressed: ‘Really...
BY CLARE SAMBROOK THE horrible death of a respected Aboriginal elder casts doubt upon often-unchallenged assumptions about the virtues of privatisation. Last week beginning 30 May in Western Australia, Graham Powell and Nina Stokoe, two former private security guards, pleaded not guilty to charges relating to the death of renowned...
Public sector union Unison said yesterday that the NHS Future Forum’s report shows a Health Bill beyond repair and that it should be scrapped. The 40-strong panel of ‘experts’ yesterday recommended that Monitor, the new NHS economic regulator, should have a duty to promote the integration of NHS care, not...
THE coalition’s much-vaunted consultation period over its proposals to smash up the NHS and privatise it out of existence finally came to an end yesterday with the publication of the results of its ‘independent review’ into the Health and Social Care Bill. This review, carried out by the NHS Future...
OVER 550 ROMEC engineers were out on strike on Friday and yesterday in their dispute over Royal Mail and other major companies breaking their National Agreements. In addition a month-long call-out ban began on Friday. On the picket line outside the British Museum, striking CWU engineer Tony McHendry told News Line:...
The NHS faces a crunch week, says the Unite union. It has issued a statement saying prime minister Cameron’s pledges on the health service were ‘a personal guarantee of chaos’. Unite, which has 100,000 members in the health service, warned that Cameron’s recent speech outlining his five ‘personal guarantees’ would actually...
LAST Friday, at the NATO summit, the outgoing US Defence Secretary Bill Gates flayed NATO savagely and ridiculed the military alliance, threatening that the US would abandon it as useless for the tasks that lie ahead for US imperialism. He insisted that the current Libyan war, far from being...
One hundred workers and youth won big support as they marched through south east London in defence of council housing on Saturday afternoon. The march from the Walworth Road through the Aylesbury council estate, organised by the South East Council of Action, had tenants waving and cheering from their balconies. The...
WESTERN and Arab countries such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia have pledged $1bn for the right-wing stooges of imperialism in Benghazi, at the latest ‘Contact Group’ conference in Abu Dhabi. As well, they are now recognising the Benghazi-based gang as ‘the legitimate interlocutor for the Libyan people’; in other words...
OVER 10,000 workers from the Greek state corporations and organisations (power and electricity, telecommunications, post-office, water authorities etc) took part in a militant and defiant rally and march in Athens on Thursday afternoon against the privatisation programme of the government. They marched through the Athens city centre to the Vouli...
THE Palestinian High Court ruled on Wednesday that an ongoing strike by Palestinian medics in the West Bank is illegal, as doctors staged a sit-in outside the government headquarters in Ramallah. By ordering the doctors to return to work, the court decided in favour of a government petition filed on...
THE Royal Mail faces privatisation this summer after the passage of the Postal Services Bill through parliament yesterday after its third reading. The legislation will enable the full or part privatisation of Royal Mail and will sever the link between the mail business and the post office network – if...
THE BMA GPs conference yesterday voted unanimously, but for a couple of abstentions, for Motion 153: ‘The Market and Any Willing Provider’. The motion from the Agenda Committee stated: ‘That Conference reaffirms its opposition to the privatisation of the NHS and: i) ‘insists that the government enshrines in the Act the...
YESTERDAY Southern Cross announced 3,000 redundancies. Its crash is underway with the lives of thousands of elderly residents at stake as well as the jobs of tens of thousands of workers. Also yesterday a new Unison report, ‘The Rise of the Public Service Industry’, was published which shows that the...
OVER half of GPs planning to retire in the next two years say NHS reforms are a reason for them going, according to preliminary findings from a major BMA survey. Speaking ahead of today’s LMC (Local Medical Committees) conference Dr Laurence Buckman, Chairman of the BMA’s GPs Committee, said: ‘These...
UNIONS have reacted angrily following the Tory-LibDem Coalition government’s Business Secretary Vince Cable’s threat to ban strikes. Cable accepted an invitation from GMB General Secretary Paul Kenny to speak to the GMB conference in Brighton on Monday, and he used that opportunity to launch an attack on trade unions and...
‘CAMERON’S speech today, with the five fake pledges on the NHS, signify that the coalition government is going full steam ahead with the health and social care bill’, BMA Council member Anna Athow told News Line yesterday. She added: ‘The bill is about privatising the whole of delivery of...
CAMERON’S warning that the NHS must ‘Reform or die’ and his statement that the ‘NHS is in danger’, were clear admissions that there is nothing wrong with the NHS, except that capitalism, and the capitalists, can no longer afford it because of the world crisis of the capitalist system....
VINCE CABLE, the coalition Business Secretary, used his speech to the GMB union’s annual conference yesterday to deliver a stark warning to the unions that the government is preparing to bring in new legislation to make strikes virtually illegal. According to GMB general secretary, Paul Kenny, Cable was invited to...
Israeli gunfire killed 11 people and wounded about 220 others on Sunday as demonstrators on the Syrian side tried to cross the ceasefire line on the annexed Golan Heights, Syria’s SANA news agency said. Hundreds of protesters rushed towards the ceasefire line, attempting to cut through a line of barbed...
DELEGATES at the GMB conference in Brighton booed and jeered Business Secretary Cable yesterday as he threatened to bring in new anti-union laws to ban strikes. Delegates applauded and shouted ‘YES’, when, referring to a day of co-ordinated strike action planned by unions representing 750,000 teachers, lecturers, civil servants and...
TAMIL youth activists in Britain took their ‘Boycott Sri Lanka Cricket’ campaign to the Lords cricket grounds on Saturday, the third day of the second Sri Lanka v England test match this summer. Several dozen Tamil activists and supporters handed out leaflets to arriving spectators and cricket officials and...
ELEVEN Palestinians were killed and over 200 wounded when Israeli troops opened fire as Palestinians stormed the occupied Golan Heights and demonstrators sought to march to Jerusalem from the Qalandiya checkpoint in Ramallah. The demonstrations were marking Naqba Day, the anniversary of the Six-Day War of 1967...
IN 1967, Israel, in the infamous ‘Six-Day War’, used its air power, and its backing from the Western powers, to defeat Arab armies and occupy the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza in Palestine, the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt, and the Golan Heights in Syria. This was the...
THE news that the United States and Britain are going to the United Nations security council to push for UN sanctions against 18 top Taliban leaders to be lifted, means only one thing – US and British imperialism have suffered a humiliating defeat in Afghanistan and are desperate to...
SOME 10,000 youth and workers congregated last Wednesday evening at the Vouli (parliament) square in Athens demanding for the seventh consecutive night the overthrow of the government. During the day telecommunication workers marched against the privatisation of Greek telecom. The Coordination Committee of trades unions have called a rally in...
A FIERCE struggle has erupted in Sri Lanka between the military-police dictatorship of Mahinda Rajapakse and over a hundred thousand garment workers in the Free Trade Zone next to Colombo International Airport. Four workers have died as a result of the state’s failed efforts to crush the strike movement by...
UNISON yesterday called on the government to end the public sector pay freeze, set to stretch for another two years for local government workers – even those earning under £21,000. A study by Incomes Data Services (IDS) into the three months to the end of April, found wage settlements...
THE Federation of University Teachers Association (FUTA) yesterday said that a decision has been made to continue their current trade union action in whatever form possible and said that it will be taken in all the universities except for J’pura, Ruhuna and Wayamba. An interim order was given by the...
A STORM of anger has erupted following the broadcast of Tuesday night’s BBC Panorama programme, which revealed terrible abuse of vulnerable adults at a privately-run hospital. Dr Peter Carter, RCN General Secretary, said yesterday: ‘The sickening abuse revealed in this programme is more shocking than anything we could have imagined.’ Unison...
HEALTHCARE as a business is now being exposed as a malicious and very nasty fraud. First we had the Mid Staffs NHS hospital crisis with hundreds of unnecessary deaths caused by the ‘dash’ to achieve Foundation Trust status. Healthcare was to be run as a business. This involved making £10 million...
THE head of the Hamas government in Gaza on Tuesday urged Palestinians to respect Egypt’s security so that Cairo would keep open the Rafah border crossing. Ismail Haniya welcomed Egypt’s decision to fully reopen the crossing last week, and warned Palestinians ‘to refrain from any breach of Egypt's security’. ‘Don’t do...
NATO air raids have killed more than 700 civilians and injured over 4,000, many of them seriously, since bombing of Libya began in March, the Libyan government spokesman Moussa Ibrahim has reported. Speaking at a news conference in Tripoli, Ibrahim said: ‘Since March 19, and up to May 26, there...
THE Sri Lankan government has announced that it has temporarily suspended the implementation of the proposed private sector pension scheme which was opposed by mass strike actions of up to 60,000 garment workers in the Katunayake free trade zone. The announcement came as the Joint Trade Union Alliance, comprising 26...
The composition of the new Palestinian Authority’s technocrat government will be announced on June 6th by delegates from Fatah and Hamas as a major step to the implementation of a unity agreement, an official said on Sunday. Member of the Fatah Central Committee Nabil Sha’th told in Gaza City following...
Oxfam UK warned yesterday that the average prices of staple crops will more than double in the next 20 years leaving billions of people starving. Oxfam states that the international food system, as it stands, is failing to feed nearly a billion people a day. The new research published yesterday...
WESTERN troops including British SAS troopers were supporting Libyan counter-revolutionaries in the vital port city of Misratah yesterday. The al Jazeera TV station has shown six armed Western troops, ‘possibly British’, seen leading a group of ‘rebels’ in Dafniya, a battle area front line near Misratah, Libya’s third-largest...
OXFAM warned yesterday that average prices of staple crops will more than double in 20 years if urgent action is not taken to change the international food system. Its report ‘Growing a Better Future’ forecasts that average international prices of key staples, such as maize, will increase by...