Monthly Archives: July 2011
EVIDENCE from Police Assistant Commissioner John Yates to the Parliamentary Home Affairs Select Committee was scorned as ‘unconvincing’ by its chairman Keith Vaz MP yesterday. Asked about his decision, after considering the question for eight hours in 2009 not to reopen the investigation, Yates claimed that his reason was...
ASSISTANT Scotland Yard Commissioner John Yates – who reviewed a Metropolitan police investigation into phone hacking and decided not to proceed to examine at least 11,000 pages of evidence, which included over 4,000 mobile numbers, 5,000 landline numbers and all of the names of those who had been hacked...
TWO THOUSAND furious Airways Pension Scheme (APS) members attended meetings at Ascot Racecourse on Monday, where they tore into the BA-appointed trustees who have used their built-in majority on the scheme’s board to transfer the inflation measure of pensions from RPI to CPI. The change has cost the 25,000 APS...
‘This is nothing less than a manifesto to break up our public services, smuggled out while all attention is focused on the misdeeds of News International,’ TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber said yesterday. Barber said the Open Public Services White Paper launched by Tory Prime Minister Cameron would mean wholesale...
On Monday Tory prime minister, David Cameron, unveiled the long awaited White Paper that will enshrine in law the ‘presumption’ that public services should be privatised. Everything from schools, hospitals right down to park-keeping will now be up for grabs with a legal duty imposed for public services to be...
THE battles against anti-worker laws across the United States have turned to the ballot boxes and courtrooms, says the AFL-CIO union federation. As voters go to the polls this week in high profile recall elections in Wisconsin, workers in other states and their lawyers will argue before judges that some...
Labour leader Ed Miliband said yesterday ‘it beggars belief’ that News International chief executive ‘Rebekah Brooks is still in her post’ and, ‘The least he (Rupert Murdoch) should do is say that Rebekah Brooks cannot continue.’ News Corp boss Murdoch arrived at News International HQ in Wapping yesterday. Before leaving...
Today the leaders of the Eurozone will be meeting once again in a desperate attempt to try and stop the collapse of the euro and prevent a massive default by Greece. This emergency meeting takes place just a week after the EU leaders made a 12 billion euro loan to...
In a double blow to the UK Government, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights has held that ‘the three-year internment of our client Hilal Abdul-Razzaq Ali Al Jedda in Basra, Iraq, violated his fundamental rights under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR)’, says Public...
Police investigating phone hacking and corruption allegations yesterday arrested former News of the World editor Andy Coulson. Former News of the World royal editor Clive Goodman, jailed for hacking in 2007, was re-arrested over corruption claims. Coulson is being held in custody. News of the arrests came as Prime Minister Cameron defended...
RUPERT Murdoch has moved with great ruthlessness to try to make sure that he takes over BSkyB by shutting down the News of the World, and making the just-arrested Coulson the scapegoat for all of the illegal payments to the police and all of the illegal phone hacking. At...
LABOUR MP TOM WATSON made an intervention of some interest in the emergency debate on the News International phone hacking scandal in the House of Commons last Wednesday. We quote from the Hansard parliamentary record. Mr Tom Watson (West Bromwich East) (Lab): News International’s decision to throw Andy Coulson to the...
Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt has been forced to delay any decision on the BSkyB takeover by News International until September, it emerged yesterday. This was after more than 130,000 people had signed a petition urging Hunt to block Rupert Murdoch’s takeover of BSkyB. NUJ general secretary Michelle Stanistreet had earlier stated:...
ON Wednesday the government published the Evidence Protocol for the ‘inquiry’ into allegations of British complicity in torture – a year after the inquiry was announced, and revealed that it is to be gagged. The acid test is whether the probed material is to be made public. It is not....
The latest health report from the Lancet considers Israel guilty of ‘crimes against humanity’ for the deaths of pregnant women and their babies at Gaza checkpoints. The findings of the report, Research in the Occupied Palestinian Territory 2, reveal the terrible hardships Palestinians bravely endure in the Occupied Palestinian Territories...
‘THOSE guilty of criminality must go to prison,’ said Labour MP Chris Bryant, opening the emergency debate on ‘phone hacking at the News of the World’. It emerged yesterday that the Murdoch press had systematically paid Metropolitan Police officers to do its bidding, with Tory Prime Minister Cameron’s former...
THE admission by Met police chief Sir Paul Stephenson, that Murdoch’s News International was paying serving police officers, comes as no shock to those workers who were hammered by both the Metropolitan Police and the Sun newspaper during the miners strike in 1984-85 and during the year-long printers struggle...
OVER 1,000 trade unionists and youth marched to parliament on Tuesday night on the 63rd birthday of the NHS, demanding: ‘Kill the Bill!’ – meaning that the Tory coalition’s Health and Social Care Bill must be scrapped. The march to defend the NHS from cuts and privatisation was called by...
‘Bombardier must be occupied and nationalised and all 3,000 jobs at the factory must be defended,’ All Trade Unions Alliance National Secretary Dave Wiltshire said yesterday. He added: ‘This of course will mean a big struggle, with an occupation supported by mass strike action and a general strike to bring...
THE proposed sacking of 1,500 Bombardier workers in Derby is the beginning of the end for the train construction industry in the UK, and is a major part of the still alive and well Thatcherite mission plan to deindustrialise the UK, and leave it dependent on service industries and...
The occupying Sri Lanka military governor in Jaffna, Major General Chandrasri now schemes to bring more than 1000 nursery schools functioning in Jaffna under the control of genocidal Colombo, TamilNet reports. As a preliminary step, the governor wants to ‘aid’ and affiliate the schools to the military-controlled administration of the...
‘The unions need to mobilise joint industrial action to defeat the Health and Social Care Bill and see off this Tory coalition government.’ This was the message of BMA Council member Anna Athow, speaking in a personal capacity, on the eve of today’s London demonstration to mark the 63rd...
The Chairman of the EU group of finance ministers, Jean-Claude Junker, spelt out at the weekend exactly what the EU and IMF ‘bailout’ of the bankrupt Greek economy really means. In an interview with a German magazine, Junker explained that under the terms of the agreement, passed by the Greek...
Delegates to the 28th International Brotherhood of Teamsters Convention in Las Vegas last week unanimously approved a resolution to prosecute chief executives and other Wall Street players responsible for the global financial crisis of 2008. ‘How come not a single Wall Street CEO has gone to jail after destroying the...
Labour is to put down an urgent question in Parliament this morning, after it emerged that Prime Minister Cameron was warned six months ago that a planned housing benefit cap will put 40,000 families onto the streets. Commenting on a leaked letter written in January from Communities and Local Government...
THE Greek Pasok capitalist government, that is using its state forces to bludgeon and gas tens of thousands of workers protesting against its sell-off of Greece to the IMF and the EU Central Bank, has just stabbed the Palestinian masses in the back. Up till now the PASOK (Socialist) regime...
OVER 40,000 workers and youth congregated in the central Athens square outside the Vouli (Greek parliament) on Thursday night despite the riot police terrorist chemical warfare of the past two days. Workers demanded the resignation of the Papandreou government and that those responsible for the riot police attack to be...
UK manufacturing growth fell to its lowest rate for 21 months in June as new orders declined, the latest Markit/Cips survey says. The groups’ manufacturing purchasing managers’ index (PMI) for June fell to 51.3, down from May’s downwardly revised measure of 52.0. Markit senior economist Rob Dobson said that growth was...
THIS week, as part of the 90th anniversary of the foundation of the Chinese Communist Party, the party general secretary and China’s president, Ho Jintao, issued a stark warning to the ruling Stalinist bureaucracy. In a speech televised throughout the country he warned: ‘If corruption does not get solved effectively,...
750,000 public sector workers struck to defend their pensions on Thursday. 70,000 of them marched through London with banners flying, determined to see the coalition attacks off, and denouncing Labour leader Miliband as a collaborator. There were banners from branches from all four trade unions involved in the action, as...
ON A DAY when 750,000 public sector workers struck to defend their pensions, 70,000 of them marched through London with banners flying, determined to see off the coalition attacks and denouncing Labour leader Miliband as a collaborator. There were banners from branches from all four trade unions involved in the...
YESTERDAY’S stoppage in defence of pensions saw 90 per cent of PCS members stopping work, the biggest turn-out for strike action in the union’s history, despite the massive media propaganda onslaught against the strike action on behalf of the coalition. In London there was a huge demonstration of over 70,000...
‘The decent work agenda is a primary need when we talk about reconstruction,’ Anthony Jones, the resident representative of the ITUC and the Trade Union Confederation of the Americas (TUCA) in Haiti said. In an interview, Jones was highlighting the urgency of placing decent work at the heart of...