Monthly Archives: November 2011
CHANCELLOR Osborne began his Autumn Statement yesterday ‘We will do whatever it takes to protect Britain from this debt storm . . .’ After stating that the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) had ‘revised down their short-term growth prospects for our country, for Europe and...
THE North East London Council of Action organised a mass picket of Chase Farm Hospital yesterday to stop the closure of Maternity, Paediatrics and A&E services at the hospital. The picket won big support from doctors, nurses, patients and hospital staff for the demonstration through Enfield on 10th December to...
TRADE UNION leaders representing millions of the public sector workers striking in defence of their pensions tomorrow angrily rebutted Education Secretary Michael Gove’s attacks on teachers yesterday. In a speech at the think tank Policy Exchange, Gove accused ‘union militants’ of wanting families to be inconvenienced. He said: ‘They want mothers...
In today’s Autumn statement on the economy, the Tory chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne, will announce that he intends to ‘kick start’ British capitalism by slashing a further £5 billion from government welfare expenditure. Osborne trailed today’s statement in an interview with the BBC on Sunday where he revealed...
THE desperate crisis of world capitalism is driving forward world revolution, as the continuing revolutionary eruptions in Greece and the eurozone states, and the sharpening of the class struggle in the UK the US show. The equally desperate response of the bourgeoisie to these developments is to stoke up the...
The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) will be going out on strike on the 6th December 2011 against Metrorail and the declining service standards on the trains. COSATU has finalised plans for the protest action which will be held on the 6th December 2011 between 13h30 – 15h30...
OVER 300 workers and youth marched from the Altab Ali Park in Aldgate East yesterday afternoon through Whitechapel to the News Line Anniversary Rally in the Theatre, Oxford House, in Bethnal Green, London. Dozens of youth carrying red flags led the march chanting: ‘Youth demand a future, youth demand...
The British Medical Association (BMA) Council on Thursday decided to oppose the whole Health and Social Care Bill, the BMA announced yesterday. The BMA Council called for the withdrawal of government plans that will lead to support services for clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) in England being provided solely by large...
THERE can be only one demand for next week’s one-day strike by public sector workers and that must be for the TUC to call every trade union out on that day in a general strike against this coalition government. There can be no doubt that the strike on November 30...
Doctors and medical students will be asked to vote on changes to their pensions at the conclusion of negotiations with the government, the British Medical Association (BMA) said yesterday. The BMA Council, the association’s governing body, met on Thursday and agreed that given the strength of feeling within the profession,...
The Athens State Prosecutor ordered that 13 trade unionists, a pensioner and an unemployed worker who were arrested by riot police last Thursday morning are to stand trail on November 30 accused of ‘disruption’, ‘resistance to the police’ and ‘causing bodily harm’. Among them is the president of the Greek...
THE GMB, the union for home care workers, commented on the ‘Close to Home Report – An inquiry into older people and human rights in home care’, from the Equality and Human Right Commission. The report pointed to examples of: • Older people not being given enough support to eat and drink • Neglect,...
Some 7,000 people are being held and tortured in inhuman conditions in Libya, in detention centres controlled by militias, according to a leaked new UN report. The report by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon ahead of a Security Council meeting on Monday states that ‘enemies of the state’ have ‘disappeared’. Many...
At 8.00am on Thursday morning the armed Greek riot police invaded the building of the State Electricity Board (DEH) Computer Centre in Athens which has been occupied by workers since Sunday night demanding the scrapping of the property tax attached to electricity bills. The president of the DEH trade...
‘The strike will go ahead,’ said Unison general secretary Dave Prentis yesterday as more unions announced their members will be joining the November 30 action. This was despite government threats that the strike will cost jobs. Prentis was responding to Treasury Secretary Danny Alexander’s announcement that there was ‘no more money...
WITH its threat to bring in new anti-union laws, that will prevent all legal strike action by all trade unions in the UK, if the public sector trade unions take strike action for longer than 15 minutes on November 30th, the coalition is sharpening the class struggle in the...
THE TRADE UNIONS condemned huge attacks on workers’ rights announced by LibDem Business Secretary Cable yesterday. Declaring he intended to make the process of getting rid of workers ‘simpler and quicker’, Cable told a businessmen’s meeting: ‘Unfair dismissal qualification period will rise from one to two years in April 2012. ‘A...
THE Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) has said the danger for the UK from the economic crisis, particularly the crisis in the Eurozone, has increased. However the minutes of the MPC show that the committee still decided that this was not the time to take measures to...
DESPITE conditions at Dale Farm being really harsh now, following Basildon Council’s brutal multi-million pound attempted eviction which began on October 19th, the community is defiant, united, cheerful and determined to stay together. Hundreds of riot police, bailiffs and contractors with heavy digging equipment moved in on that day, throwing...
The Equality and Human Rights Commission’s report on home care yesterday revealed shocking examples of how basic care for the elderly in their own homes is sometimes so bad it breaches human rights. But the GMB condemned the report’s failure to identify that the private sector aim of making money...
UN human rights chief Navi Pillay has called for an independent investigation into violence in Egypt and said she deplored the killing of protesters by military and security forces. ‘I urge the Egyptian authorities to end the clearly excessive use of force against protesters in Tahrir Square and elsewhere in...
THE Egyptian workers delivered another massive blow at imperialism, Arab feudalists, Zionism and the Egyptian pro-imperialist military when hundreds of thousands of them reoccupied the Tahrir Square yesterday, driving back brutal, repressive military police forces that have killed up to 60 workers and youth in the last few...
THE Greek coalition’s Finance Minister Evagelos Venizelos has said that the general election date agreed for February 19 by both the ex-Prime Minister Papandreou and Conservative leader Samaras, must be postponed. He says that more time is needed to prepare and adopt the necessary austerity measures stemming form the EC-IMF...
GP commissioning will not in fact be GP commissioning. This was brought home in a Channel Four news item on Monday night which publicised GPs’ concerns about the government’s new guidance on ‘GP commissioning’. The Department of Health (DH) has produced a document called ‘Developing Commissioning Support Towards Service...
Israeli settler organisations have been given the green light by the Israeli government to take over a number of East Jerusalem homes belonging to Palestinians, a Palestinian presidential legal adviser said on Sunday. Ahmad Ruweidi said the Israeli government had waited until the timing was right politically to implement court...
The once mighty US economy is set to take another irrevocable step to bankruptcy tomorrow with the news that the ‘super’ congressional committee charged with finding $1.2 trillion in cuts by Wednesday is set to fail dismally. This committee, composed of Republican and Democrat members of Congress, was cobbled together...
A proposal for a coordinated West Coast port shutdown was passed with unanimous consensus by vote of the Occupy Oakland General Assembly last Friday. The proposal stated: ‘In response to coordinated attacks on the occupations and attacks on workers across the nation: ‘Occupy Oakland calls for the blockade and disruption...
Tens of thousands of protesters flooded into Cairo’s Tahrir Square yesterday, demanding the immediate removal of the Egyptian military regime. As the square filled up the protesters declared that they had retaken Tahrir, defying police attacks with tear gas, rubber bullets and live rounds. Morgue officials said yesterday that the death...
In the Republic of Ireland, a government report has been released which shows that public sector cuts will mean 23,500 workers lose their jobs, devastating frontline services and resulting in 40 decentralisation projects being abandoned. However, the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, Brendan Howlin, has insisted...
EGYPTIAN workers and youth have reoccupied Tahrir Square in Cairo, and are keeping the military and the police at bay, following Saturday’s deadly clashes in which the state forces killed two workers, arrested scores more, and injured more than 800. The Egyptian workers are not prepared to accept a military...
The government is planning a new savage assault on the sick and disabled. A government-commissioned review by Professor Carol Black and former head of the British Chambers of Commerce David Frost has said that people should be designated as long-term sick only by an ‘independent assessment service’ and not...
A court in the governorate of Qalioubiya, north of Cairo, has ruled in favour of independent trade union candidates taking part in the general election. Independent trade union members are fighting for their right to run as worker representatives in the upcoming parliamentary elections; Wednesday’s court ruling could set...
THE noose strangling the entire capitalist economy of Europe tightened round the neck of Germany yesterday with the news that the powerful Asian investment markets are getting out of the eurozone as fast as their legs can carry them. Investors from Japan and China have been dumping eurozone bonds in...
TENS of thousands of students, youth and workers demonstrated last Thursday in Athens, and in all Greek cities and towns, on the 38th Anniversary of the 1973 Athens Polytechnic Uprising which led to the overthrow of the military junta that ruled Greece from 1967-74. Greek workers and youth are today...
THE UK economy is ‘in a bad place, with confidence evaporating’, the head of the UK’s biggest employers’ organisation has warned. John Cridland, director general of the CBI, said that only businesses could dig the UK out of the ‘mess’. With belt-tightening by consumers and the government, ‘it’s business investment and...
NORTHERN Rock (NR) plc is being sold to Virgin Money by the coalition government for £747m. After Northern Rock was nationalised in 2008 it was split in two, Northern Rock plc and Northern Rock (Asset Management), the latter being the bad debt bank that has already cost the taxpayer...
Public Interest Lawyers (PIL) have begun a legal action challenging the coalition government’s ‘Mandatory Work Scheme’ which it argues amounts to unlawful forced labour. PIL sent a ‘letter-before-action’ on Wednesday night to the Work and Pensions Secretary Ian Duncan-Smith – the first step in a High Court judicial review...
US President Obama has angered China over his plans to expand the American military presence in Australia. In an address to the Australian Parliament yesterday morning, Obama said he had ‘made a deliberate and strategic decision: as a Pacific nation, the United States will play a larger and long-term role...
DALE FARM residents are defiant, maintaining their community and bravely refusing to be battered into submission by the brutal actions of the Tory Basildon Council. They have been left living in extremely dangerous conditions after police, bailiffs and contractors invaded the site on 19th October. The council has organised the...
JOSHUA Ogunleye, National Secretary of the Young Socialists, told News Line yesterday: ‘The huge rise in youth unemployment to over the one million mark is a statement that this system cannot provide a future for young people. ‘The anger that we saw in last August’s riots, and the recent student...
THE three months to September to 2.62 million, as youth unemployment rose above a million. Yet not one trade union leader called for action to bring the Tory-led coalition down. With the jobless total for 16 to 24-year-olds hitting a record of 1.02 million in the quarter, and...