Monthly Archives: February 2012
Eight mental health workers and their families, who live in the Chase Farm hospital residences, face eviction. The trust has issued eviction notices for these tenants to vacate their homes by last January 31 2012. The only option they were given in order to stay is to agree to pay treble...
THE Leveson Inquiry has exposed the diseased nature of British capitalism, its ruling class and its state apparatus. The state, during the period of the heyday of the empire, was viewed as incorruptible. Today, in the period of the decline and fall of British imperialism, it is proving to...
WANDSWORTH Council’s plan to sell off four acres of playing fields at Elliot Secondary School in Putney is an absolute scandal, said the GMB yesterday. The GMB represents school support staff and is calling on residents of the south London borough to demonstrate at 7.30pm tonight outside the Tory council’s...
THE United Steelworkers (USW) on Monday said that members of Local 207L have ratified a five-year contract with Cooper Tire and Rubber Company (NYSE:CTB), ending a three-month lockout at the company’s Findlay, Ohio tyre plant. The new contract was ratified with approximately 66% per cent of the 948 ballots cast. ‘Our...
MURDOCH'S News Group Newspapers (NGN) ‘are not truly sorry, only sorry they got caught,’ Charlotte Church insisted in a devastating statement outside the High Court yesterday morning. At the same time as the Welsh singer was speaking, Metropolitan Police Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers told the Leveson Inquiry into press,...
Royal Colleges which attended last week’s Downing Street ‘Health Bill War Summit’ are reversing their positions and coming out in opposition to the Bill. Members of the Royal College of Surgeons are holding an extraordinary meeting next Thursday March 8th to reverse the College’s support for the Health and Social...
A concerted public relations exercise has been launched to vilify the unemployed and attack critics of its flagship policy of forcing those on Jobseekers allowance into working for nothing or risk losing benefit. In an interview last Sunday Sir Stuart Rose, multi millionaire ex-boss of Marks and Spencer, declared himself...
Shakespeare’s Globe has announced the gift of £1.5 million from an anonymous private donor for a matched-giving scheme to help the Globe reach its fund-raising target of £7 million towards the new Indoor Jacobean Theatre. For every pound raised by the Globe, it will be matched from the £1.5 million...
Israeli forces clashed with Palestinians in Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque compound on Friday, exchanging a volley of tear gas and rocks. Israeli troops entered the Haram al-Sharif (Noble Compound) after the Friday noon prayer, and fired tear and sound grenades, causing confusion amongst the large crowds who worship at the holy...
The ‘Friends of Syria Conference’ in Tunis has seen the representatives of the United States and the UK, Clinton and Hague, laying into Russia and China for preventing them getting a UN Security Council decision to intervene Libyan-style into Syria, with massive airpower to bomb and blast it into...
Doctors will be balloted on industrial action short of a strike, after the government failed to return to meaningful talks on NHS pensions, the BMA announced on Saturday. Strike action was ruled out as part of a unanimous commitment to ensuring that whatever action is taken does not cause harm...
OVER 30 angry patients denounced a sham consultation meeting by NHS managers over the imminent closure of the contracted-out Camden Town GP Surgery in north London on Thursday. Anger erupted at the admission by Tony Hoolihan, NHS North-Central London contracts manager, that, ‘We are not consulting patients about preventing closure...
CURRENTLY, the ‘Friends of Syria’ conference in Tunis is considering the best way for the imperialist powers to intervene in Syria to overthrow president Assad, and begin the big push to smash the Hezbollah movement in the Lebanon and drive forward regime change in Iran. At the same time, a...
Employees in public universities and colleges in the West Bank and Gaza Strip entered the third day of a strike on Wednesday. Head of the employees union Khayriya Hamadneh said that she has not received any official response to the strike. The main demand of the strike action is a salary...
Yesterday, local government employers confirmed that they are to impose a pay freeze for the third year running on 1.6 million council workers. Unison, Unite and the GMB trade unions said yesterday that even more local government workers will fall into the trap of poverty. Even those on the lowest wages...
YESTERDAY, a conference was convened in London to organise the intervention into Somalia by imperialist forces, led by the UK, acting under the cover of an African Union ‘humanitarian’ invasion force. The conference was attended by the leaders of western imperialism along with representatives of their client states in Africa and...
FIFTY Swindon striking hospital workers came down to London by coach last Tuesday to lobby the Headquarters of their employer Carillion demanding an end to bullying, harassment and discrimination. The delegation of workers and union reps marched up the front steps of the main entrance of the building where they...
THE coalition’s ex-Defence Secretary, Fox, put forward his demands for the Tory-led coalition’s March 21 crisis budget yesterday in the Financial Times. It was a class war message aimed at further enriching the bosses at the expense of the working class, the middle class, youth, the poor, and the trade...
A coachload of fifty Swindon striking hospital workers yesterday descended on the London Headquarters of Carillion in Euston with shouts of ‘Respect at work! They are demanding an end to alleged bullying, harassment and discrimination by the Carillion company that employs them as kitchen staff and cleaners at Swindon hospital. Simultaneously,...
THE Tory-LibDem Coalition stepped up its mass youth slave labour drive yesterday, with Deputy Prime Minister Clegg launching his payment-by-results ‘Neets’ campaign. ‘Neets’ is the government’s derogatory and disrespectful term for the more than one million unemployed youth that they have deprived of employment, education or training. Clegg urged businesses...
COALITION leader Cameron is considering calls to freeze the minimum wage, with the British Chambers of Commerce advising that ‘Britain cannot afford to price people out of work’, a code meaning that wage cuts are the only way that British capitalism is going to make a profit. With inflation...
SEVEN unions held a joint demonstration outside the Royal Courts of Justice on Monday against the government’s imposed changes in the way they calculate pensions, robbing workers of thousands of pounds. The government are now calculating how much pensions should increase to be in line with inflation using the...
‘DON’T you dare lie to me!’ angry pensioner June Hautot shouted at Health Secretary Lansley as she confronted him at the entrance to Downing Street on his way into Cameron’s Health and Social Care Bill ‘war summit’ yesterday. Lansley had denied to her that the Health and Social Care Bill...
Yesterday six trade unions appeared at the Royal Courts of Justice to appeal against a High Court decision that the coalition government will slash the pensions of millions of public sector workers is lawful. The case revolves around a legal challenge mounted by the main public sector unions – PCS,...
The Israeli Supreme Court will hear a petition on Thursday against the continued administrative detention of hunger-striking prisoner Khader Adnan, the Palestinian prisoners society said on Sunday. The military secretariat informed lawyer Jawad Bulus that his appeal against Adnan’s administrative detention order will go before the court in four days,...
‘HEALTH unions must now do what their members want and organise industrial action to defeat this bill,’ leading BMA member Anna Athow demanded yesterday. She was speaking as it emerged that this afternoon’s Health Bill ‘summit’ with prime minister Cameron specifically excludes all unions and Royal Medical Colleges which oppose...
David Cameron has convened a summit at Downing Street this afternoon to discuss the ‘implementation of NHS reforms’ with a ‘range of national healthcare organisations and clinical commissioning groups’. Those specifically excluded from this summit are the British Medical Association, along with the Royal Colleges of Nursing, of GPs,...
Tens of thousands of workers and youth participated in yet another mass rally outside the Vouli (Greek parliament) in Athens yesterday, demanding the overthrow of the Greek government and the so-called second bailout agreement imposed by the European Commission (EC) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) of huge reductions...
The Unite trade union, yesterday welcomed the withdrawal of controversial contracts by Balfour Beatty Engineering Services (BBES), which would have resulted in the termination of long-held agreements and the de-skilling of construction workers. A Unite statement said: ‘The imposition of the new contracts by BBES were at the heart of...
The Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) plans to make disabled people work for no pay for charities, corporations and other firms, said Disabled People Against Cuts yesterday. DPAC warned: ‘Disabled people and other targeted claimant groups are being forced to work for 30 hours a week for their benefits,...
Civil servants’ union, PCS has slammed ‘the unfairness of the government paying huge salaries and bonuses to senior civil servants, sometimes even helping them to avoid tax while most public sector workers are suffering a four-year pay freeze.’ It was revealed on Thursday that more than 25 senior staff employed...
THE Libyan people are being told that they must celebrate the first anniversary of the ‘revolution’ (in fact, counter-revolution) that has destroyed their country, murdered their leadership, and left the country at the mercy of Islamic militias who have their own prison camps and torture centres, and have destroyed...
Armed militias operating across Libya are committing widespread human rights abuses with impunity, warned Amnesty International in a new report released yesterday. The report, Militias threaten hopes for new Libya, comes a year on from the start of the February 2011 NATO-backed counter-revolution. It documents widespread and serious abuses, including war...
RISK assessments about the impact of Tory health secretary Andrew Lansley’s health and social care bill on the NHS throw light on the devastation of the health service that will result from its implementation. These assessments, drawn up by four English NHS regions (London, the North, the South and Midlands...
The British Medical Association (BMA) has requested an urgent meeting with the Chief Secretary to the Treasury in a further effort to re-start talks with the government on changes to the NHS pension scheme. The BMA’s Council is meeting on Saturday, February 25, to consider the options for balloting on...
A NEWLY released report submitted to the United Nations by international organizations working in Hebron (Al Khalil) documents a sharp increase in serious human rights violations against Palestinian civilians, particularly youth and children, living in the Old City and Tel Rumeida. Since the unit has returned to Hebron...
unemployment soared by another 48,000 to 2.67 million in the three months to December, the Office for National Statistics reported yesterday. The official unemployment rate now stands at 8.4%, the highest for 16 years. There was also a new record for the number of jobless youth, with the number of unemployed...
THE Office for National Statistics said yesterday that UK unemployment rose by 48,000 to 2.67 million in the three months to December, pushing the unemployment rate up to 8.4%, the highest for 16 years. The number of young people without a job rose 22,000 to 1.04m, taking...
REGIONAL NHS ‘risk assessments’ have been published showing the fears that NHS managers have of the consequences of the government’s Health and Social Care Bill becoming law before Easter. The assessments are by the four NHS ‘super-regions’ in England, which were created last year by merging 10 regional bodies...
THE numbers of Nigerians living in poverty, in the midst of vast oil riches, has risen to nearly 61 per cent. Poverty has risen sharply in Nigeria, with over 100 million people living on less than a $1 a day, despite the country’s economic growth and its vast oil wealth. Nigeria’s...