Monthly Archives: May 2012
THE CRISIS of the British capitalist state has been highlighted by the News International scandals which will do for the British ruling class what the Rasputin scandals did for the Tsarist autocracy. His comings and goings with princesses, ballerinas and countesses, coupled with his role in advising the...
BANK of England Governor King admitted yesterday that risks to the UK economy from ‘difficulties facing the euro area’ are ‘impossible to quantify’. King was presenting the Bank’s quarterly inflation report. Announcing that the Bank was cutting its growth forecast for this year to 0.8% from 1.2%, King claimed that ‘there...
Rebekah Brooks and her husband Charlie, plus four others, were yesterday charged with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. Charlie is a chum of PM Cameron since their Eton days. Alison Levitt, QC, principal legal adviser to the Director of Public Prosecutions overseeing CPS decision-making, outlined the charges. She said:...
Essex fire crews have given formal legal notice of a strike ballot in a dispute over frontline cuts and changes forced through without proper negotiation or agreement. The legal timetable governing ballots would typically mean no strike action can take place until seven days after the ballot closes on 13...
TEACHERS unions have condemned the onslaught on children with Special Educational Needs (SEN), launched by the coalition government yesterday. Legislation to slash the rights and numbers of SEN children will be included in a Children and Families Bill, announced in the Queen’s Speech last week. Children’s minister Sarah Teather claimed yesterday...
UK Chancellor George Osborne lashed out at Germany’s ‘Iron Chancellor’ Merkel before the meeting of EU finance ministers in Brussels yesterday. He attacked Merkel for suggesting that the time was fast approaching when Greece would have to be drummed out of the EU. Merkel spoke up as the Greek election...
Despite immense pressure the leader of the Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA), Alexis Tsipras, refused to join or support a ‘grand coalition’ government at a meeting on Sunday afternoon called by the President of Greece, Karolos Papoulias. Yesterday morning the Athens Stock exchange dived by 3.5% having lost over...
Nurses at the RCN Annual Conference in Harrogate yesterday heckled and poured scorn on claims by Health Secretary Lansley that clinical staffing levels in the NHS had actually increased under the Tory-led coalition. Lansley was speaking in the wake of a Royal College of Nursing (RCN) study that warned that...
The economic and political crisis in the Eurozone countries is now firmly expressing itself in Germany, the dominant capitalist nation in Europe and the economic ‘powerhouse’ of the continent. While the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, has been busy in the past week denouncing Greek and French workers for voting in...
Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) General Secretary David Begg has said that the Dublin government could delay ratification of the Fiscal Compact Treaty, if passed. He urged the government to stand ‘four square behind (Francois) Hollande’ to ensure there is a new growth strategy for Europe. In an address to...
IT is a disgrace that the trade union leaders who led the May 10th pensions strike, when 400,000 trade union members stopped work, refused to call a national demonstration in London on that day, so that the full force of the action could be directed against the coalition, to...
USW CANADIAN National Director Ken Neumann addressed the 37th Ordinary General Convention of the National Union of Mine, Metal, Steel and Allied Workers of the Mexican Republic (Los Mineros) on May 3rd, 2012. Nemann said: ‘Napoleon Gomez Urrutia, General Secretary of Los Mineros, Comrade and Friend; ‘Members of the National...
Around 100 Syrians and supporters held a vigil outside the Syrian embassy in London last Friday evening, to condemn last Thursday’s terrorist bombings in Damascus. Rima told News Line: ‘We’re here to show support for our president Bashar and for Syria. ‘Yesterday two bombs in Damascus killed over 70 people and...
The Royal College of Nursing yesterday called for a halt to the closure of hospital beds until trusts can clearly demonstrate that alternative, tried and tested patient services in the community are available. The comments came as a new survey commissioned by the RCN, released on the eve of its...
THE government’s claims about numbers of civil servants on strike over pensions are wildly inaccurate, the Public and Commercial Services union has insisted. Nearly 200,000 PCS members walked out in Thursday’s strike – according to figures communicated to the union’s head office from picket lines across the UK. There were...
Prime Minister Cameron ended several text messages to former Sun and News of the World editor Rebekah Brooks with the letters LOL, she told the Leveson Inquiry yesterday. Lead counsel for the inquiry, Robert Jay QC, asked her about the frequency of text contacts between the two when she was...
THE UN Security Council has condemned the truck bomb attacks that killed at least 55 people and wounded almost 400 in the Syrian capital, Damascus, on Thursday. This followed a blast on the previous day in Dar’a, which killed and wounded 10 Syrian soldiers and almost killed the commander of...
ACROSS the UK, hundreds of thousands of public sector workers were on strike yesterday against government plans to make them work longer and pay more for smaller pensions. At the Welsh assembly, Cardiff, all business was suspended and Labour and Plaid Cymru Assembly Members did not cross the picket...
IT was Karl Marx who in 1848, two months before the February revolution erupted in France, began the Communist Manifesto with the words ‘A Spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism’. He saluted this spectre and as the revolution developed urged the masses to make the revolution...
RESPONDING to the plans for ‘secret justice’ and closed courts set out in the Queen’s Speech on Wednesday, Reprieve’s Executive Director, Clare Algar said: ‘Closed courts will not strengthen oversight of the intelligence agencies – in fact, they will do precisely the opposite. They will put the government above...
THE Queen’s speech spelt out that her Tory-LibDem government is to step up its war against public sector pensions, continue to place the state above the law on the issue of basic rights, and will carry on deregulating, giving the bosses the right to hire and fire as...
SUCCESSIVE British administrations have hidden the truth about the massacre of 24 unarmed Malaysian rubber plantation workers by UK troops in 1948, says a UK-based lawyer representing relatives of the victims. The current Tory-led government’s refusal last November to hold a formal investigation into the Batang Kali killing was...
PRIME minister Cameron’s former press secretary Andy Coulson yesterday won a ruling that he can appeal against News International’s refusal to pay his legal fees. Coulson appears at the Leveson Inquiry tomorrow, where he faces questions about his relationship with Cameron and other politicians and his editorship of the News...
FOLLOWING the failure to form a government by the leader of the Greek Tories, Antonis Samaras, the leader of the Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRZIA) is now attempting this task. The bourgeoisie of Europe cannot believe their eyes and ears at the revolutionary developments in Greece where...
Jailed Fatah leader Marwan Barghouthi said on Sunday that Palestinian prisoners would remain united in their support for fellow prisoners on hunger-strike. Prisoners affiliated to different political factions and in prisons across Israel all support the hunger strikers, who are ‘fighting a battle for freedom and dignity’ Barghouthi said in...
The leader of the Greek conservatives Antonis Samaras, whose New Democracy party came top in last Sunday’s general election, winning just below 19 per cent of the vote, failed to form a new government on Monday. Although the social-democrats leader Vangelis Venizelos offered his support to a ‘national coalition government’,...
Two firebombs were thrown at the Tel Aviv home of African residents on Saturday night, Israeli daily Haaretz reported. It is the second such attack of its kind in the last two weeks targeting African residents in south Tel Aviv. In late April, firebombs were thrown at a kindergarten and apartments...
The elections in France and Greece on Sunday demonstrated conclusively that Europe stands on the brink of a seismic revolutionary upheaval that will sweep the Continent. In France the anti-austerity socialist party candidate, Francois Hollande, inflicted a humiliating defeat on the incumbent president Nicolas Sarkozy who became the first president...
Workers and youth in Greece delivered an historic death blow to the present bourgeois parties and to the whole political two-party system in Sunday’s general election. The combined vote of the conservatives and of the social-democrats, who imposed the EC-IMF dictated ‘Accord’ of barbaric austerity measures, reached just 32 per...
THE Tories are down but they are not out! The trade unions must mobilise for action at once to deliver a knock-out blow to bring this discredited Tory-LibDem coalition crashing down. This means that even at this late hour, with 500,000 workers due to take action on May 10th in...
About 300 people are being held after violent clashes outside the defence ministry in Cairo on Friday which left one soldier dead and hundreds of protesters wounded. The ruling military council imposed a curfew in the area around the ministry on Friday and Saturday from 23:00 local time (21:00 GMT)...
Head teachers yesterday denounced Ofsted’s ‘bully boy tactics’ and sent a strong message to the chief inspector (HMCI) of schools, Sir Michael Wilshaw, in an emergency motion to the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) annual conference. The motion said the conference was ‘saddened and angered’ by the approach taken...
THERE WERE big gains for Labour in Thursday’s English and Welsh local elections. Neither incumbent Boris Johnson nor Labour’s Ken Livingtone achieved 50 per cent of the vote in the London mayoral election, leading to a complicated second preference count. Labour candidate Joe Anderson became Liverpool’s first elected mayor. But voters in...
WORKERS and youth in Greece are set to deliver the biggest electoral blow ever this Sunday against the two main capitalist parties, the conservatives and the social-democrats. These are the two parties which, in the last two years, have carried out the barbaric austerity measures dictated by the EC...
THE Tories and the LibDems were whipped around the country in the council elections, with Labour retaking Liverpool and numerous cities and towns, as voters gave their response to Cameron and Osborne’s austerity measures. In Birmingham, Coventry, Manchester and Bradford the electors gave their thumbs down to having more bourgeois...
Tenants on the Aylesbury estate are very angry at Southwark Council’s indifference to their complaints and the Council’s high handed attitude towards tenants’ needs. Tenants have voted on numerous occasions to keep the Aylesbury estate under council control and believe that the council is trying to create conditions to force...
ON Wednesday night, the outgoing governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, delivered a speech that amounted to little more than an extensive exercise in re-writing history to try to excuse himself from any responsibility for not noticing that the capitalist system was about to collapse. King did...
COSATU president Sdumo Dlamini has publicly endorsed the re-election of ANC president Jacob Zuma, thus exposing the tensions existing within the trade union federation. Dlamini, who was flanked by Zuma and SACP general secretary Blade Nzimande, made his announcement at the main Workers’ May Day rally in Botshabelo, the Free...
The second Carillion investigation into complaints by 150 GMB members has found evidence of bribery and shakedowns on the PFI contract operated by the company at the Great Western Hospital in Swindon, the GMB union said yesterday. On April 27, in letters to individual members, Carillion communicated the interim conclusions...
Public sector union Unison yesterday said that some of its worst fears are coming true over NHS privatisation. This came after it was revealed that Circle, the private company that has taken over the running of Hinchingbrooke hospital, Cambridgeshire, will cream off £2m (44 per cent) of the hospital’s surpluses...
‘A socialist revolution in this country will open up the whole of the world,’ Frank Sweeney, the General Secretary of the Workers Revolutionary Party, told the rally of a hundred after the May Day March last Tuesday. The May Day Rally took place at the Africa Centre in Covent Garden...
TENS of thousands of workers and youth held strong anti-government marches and rallies in all Greek cities and towns on May Day. Seafarers, railway, urban transport and local government workers staged 100 per cent solid 24-hour strikes or stoppages. In Athens several trade union branches, who oppose the treacherous...
Royal Air Force Typhoon jets based at RAF Northolt will be roaring across London and the home counties tomorrow and Saturday as part of Operation Exercise Olympic Guardian, which lasts until May 10. It is the first time fighter jets have been stationed at the west London site since World...