Monthly Archives: June 2012
THOUSANDS of London bus workers will take strike action next Thursday 5th July followed by action on Tuesday 24 July in a dispute over London bus operators’ continued refusal to recognise their workers’ extra effort over the Olympics with a £500 Olympic award. Unite accused the bus operators of playing...
Over forty Libyans demonstrated at Downing Street on Thursday evening to express their anger at the British government’s role in the war on their country. Aziz Daw said: ‘There are killings and torture on a daily basis, and two million Libyans have been displaced into neighbouring countries. ‘There are over 20,000...
THE Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad has reiterated that the sole way to resolve Syria’s current crisis is through a ‘national model’. He added: ‘What took place in Libya is not the model to settle the Syrian crisis and no plan or model except a “national model” will work in...
THE BMA ARM has condemned the Tory-led drive to impose local pay deals on the public sector – which would mean the end of national agreements, and decided that the ‘BMA Council should campaign to maintain national contracts’. BMA Council Member Anna Athow, from Enfield and Haringey Division, moved...
DELEGATES at the BMA representatives meeting in Bournemouth yesterday called for Health Secretary Lansley to resign against the advice of their leadership. Motion 22 from City and Hackney Division stated quite simply: ‘That this Meeting has no confidence in Andrew Lansley, the Secretary for Health, and calls for him to...
WHEN it comes to fraud and stealing vast amounts of money the banks make your average burglar or spiv look like the rank amateurs that they are. With the banks, their fraud is on a grand and global scale and their thieving ways cause damage and hardship to countless millions...
THERE was a lively fringe meeting on the first evening of the BMA Conference in Bournemouth on Monday, organised by the All Trades Unions Alliance. Speakers included four of the ‘BMA Five’ Council members, who had carried out a struggle for the BMA to organise a public campaign against...
BMA leaders narrowly escaped censure for their lack of leadership during the struggle against the Health and Social Care Bill yesterday, when 44% of the BMA ARM voted no confidence in their leadership. The motion of no confidence at the BMA Annual Representative Meeting in Bournemouth was lost by 53%...
PLANS for more secret court hearings, in the Justice and Security Bill, will create a ‘statutory straitjacket’ for judges, Martin Chamberlain, one of the special advocates due to be involved in such cases, warned Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights on Tuesday. He said if the justice secretary, Kenneth...
The British Medical Association Annual representative meeting in Bournmouth on Monday gave its support to medical students who have been hit hard by trippling tuition fees, lack of jobs on graduation, and the attack on pensions. Addressing the conference, Medical Student Committee co-chair Marion Matheson said: ‘This year medical students...
THREE London hospitals face the threat of immediate closure as a result of PFI-induced bankruptcy, it emerged yesterday. In the first case of its kind, Health Secretary Lansley formally warned the South London Healthcare Trust that it is set to be declared bankrupt. Lansley announced that administrators, who would have the...
THE message from the government over the proposed dissolving of the South London Healthcare Trust and the closure of its major hospitals is that the NHS is to be bankrupted and closed to defend the interests of the banks and their PFI robbery schemes. South London Healthcare,...
DELEGATES to the British Medical Association (BMA) Annual Representative Meeting (ARM) in Bournemouth yesterday voted for a ‘campaign by the BMA to repeal the Health and Social Care Act’. The conference voted against the recommendation of BMA Chairman Hamish Meldrum to oppose the amendment to motion 102 on the Health...
THE imperialist military alliance, NATO, meets today at the request of Turkey which will be invoking Article 4 of its treaty which covers threats to ‘member states’ security’. The cause of this emergency meeting is the shooting down of a Turkish jet fighter, which invaded Syrian airspace last Friday on...
THE Counter Olympics Network (CON) has announced a march and rally in London’s East End on Saturday 28 July, assembling in Mile End Park (near Mile End tube station) at 12 noon, and marching to Victoria Park for a family friendly People’s Games for All which will include speeches,...
THE government plans to close Hammersmith and Charing Cross A&Es, warns Labour MP Andy Slaughter, who is calling on everyone to demonstrate in Westminster at 1.00pm today. The MP stressed that the effect on Charing Cross will mean the closure of the hospital. He said that the cuts will leave the...
THE PM has said that people under the age of 25 are to lose their right to housing benefit, as part of moves to cut the welfare bill. This arrogant class war action, if allowed to be carried out, will condemn hundreds of thousands of young people to live on...
IN Once Again, Whither France? (March 1935) Leon Trotsky discussed the call for a general strike. He wrote: ‘The general strike, as every Marxist knows, is one of the most revolutionary methods of struggle. ‘The general strike is not possible except at a time when the class struggle rises above particular...
TRADE unions yesterday slammed Cameron’s plans to axe housing benefits for under-25-year-olds. A TUC spokesman told News Line: ‘This is a vicious attack on young people and will be counter-productive, even on its own terms, as it will stop young people looking for work.’ GMB national officer Sharon Holder said: ‘The...
BUS workers’ union Unite yesterday warned of further strike action as London bus workers in over 70 garages went on strike across the capital. They took action over a refusal by bus operators and Transport for London (TfL) to award an Olympics payment. The strike action was solid across 17 London...
THE election results from May 6th in Greece and France show that the working class will use every opportunity to fight against paying for the capitalist crisis. The counter-revolutionary reformist Socialist Party in France called for ‘growth’ as a means of defending French imperialism against the angry movement of the...
THE credit ratings agency Moody’s has downgraded 15 global banks and financial institutions. The UK banks downgraded were Royal Bank of Scotland, Barclays, HSBC and Lloyds. The other institutions that have been downgraded are Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase, Credit Suisse, UBS, BNP Paribas, Credit Agricole, Societe Generale, Deutsche...
MOSCOW – In an interview to the Ekho Moskvy radio station as part of the St Petersburg International Economic Forum, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said the Libyan scenario of the development of the situation in Syria is impossible. ‘The Libyan scenario will not be permitted in the case of...
AFTER governments across Europe either took over debt-laden banks, or the debts of the banks, in 2008 they demanded ‘austerity measures’ to repay the debts. Right-wing capitalist governments and parties are imposing draconian ‘austerity measures’ in all the states of the EU. bail-outs for small EU states, like Greece, Ireland and...
THE Egyptian revolution moved into a decisive stage yesterday with the announcement by the election committee overseeing the recent final run-off for president that it would not be announcing the result until next Saturday. The two candidates, Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood and Ahmed Shafiq, the military’s candidate, both...
Over 50 doctors and their supporters organised a demonstration outside the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel, East London yesterday during their strike over major changes to the NHS pension scheme. Over 100,000 BMA members took an active part in the action all over the UK. Doctor Shan, a British Medical Association...
EVERY TRADE UNION and all trade unionists must support today’s 24 hour strike action by the BMA doctors’ trade union, and must be demanding of their own trade union leaders just why the whole of the trade union movement is not out with them! Today is a day...
A REVOLUTIONARY situation exists in Europe today as a result of the world capitalist crisis. Social Democratic/Labour and Stalinist reformists, and revisionists, may scoff at this statement in order to defend their counter-revolutionary support for the bourgeois order, or hide their cowardly capitulation to the ruling class. To them we offer...
THAT the Health and Social Care Act is all about privatising the NHS and handing it over to the private sector via the new commissioning bodies is well known. Although the Act has only just been passed, its actual essence, the commissioning bodies, have been up and running for some...
IN CONDITIONS of polarisation, the conservative New Democracy party won Sunday’s crucial and vastly internationally significant Greek general election gaining 29.6 per cent of the votes cast, about 1.8m votes, an increase of 10.8 per cent since May’s election. The Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA) came second with...
CABINET Office Minister Francis Maude launched a vicious onslaught on civil servants, their jobs and their trade union yesterday. He pledged to scrap up to 120,000 civil service jobs. PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka commented: ‘This plan is built on sand because cutting more than 100,000 jobs and allowing the...
BUS workers are to increase their Olympic Games payment claim against the bus privateers and Transport for London (TfL), Unite declared yesterday. London buses will come to a standstill on Friday, as bus workers from every London bus privateer take strike action across the capital for the first time in...
The world crisis of capitalism is asserting itself with a vengeance, defying every attempt by governments and the world financial system to bring it under control or even mitigate its disastrous spiral into a full blown collapse of the entire capitalist system on a world scale. Nowhere has the inability...
BANGLADESH garment bosses have indefinitely shut down all operations in over 300 factories at a key industrial hub after five days of violent protests over wages. President of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association, Shafiul Islam Mohiuddin, announced the plants would reopen only after the government ensures ‘enough security’. Most...
IT HAS emerged that Leveson, whose current inquiry was brought into being by Prime Minister Cameron, complained to the UK’s top civil servant after a cabinet minister, Tory Education Secretary Michael Gove, a former Murdoch employee at the Times newspaper, raised ‘concerns’ that his inquiry was targeting the freedom...
FOLLOWING Egypt’s Supreme Constitutional Court ruling that the just-elected parliament is illegitimate, workers are vowing that they will not allow the return to a military police dictatorship. ‘The constitutional court affirmed in the details of its verdict that the parliamentary elections were not constitutional, and the entire composition of...
AS GREEK workers went to the polls yesterday, bourgeois commentators were warning of a ‘widespread contagion’ or even an ‘asteroid strike’ of an economic catastrophe across the globe if voters refuse to back the EU. The election of a Syriza government would lead to a Greek exit from the euro...
Chancellor Osborne and Bank of England Governor King announced a massive £140bn emergency stimulus package for ailing British capitalism on Thursday night. Both were speaking at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet at the Mansion House. However, yesterday’s new figures showed the UK trade in goods deficit continued to widen to £10.1bn in...
THE GOVERNOR of the Bank of England, King, spoke to the gathered ranks of big business on Thursday evening at his Mansion House feast, as the darkest clouds of the world crisis gathered. The rate on Spanish debt rose to over seven per cent. Greece nears Sunday’s General election, which...
CROWDS marched to Cairo’s Tahrir Square again yesterday after the April 6 movement called for a protest starting at 5.00pm (1500 GMT) ‘against the soft military coup.’ ‘We will save our revolution. We will save Egypt from military rule,’ the group said in a statement sent out early in the...
PRIME minister Cameron claimed yesterday that Andy Coulson, who had resigned as editor of the News of the World and who currently faces charges of perverting the course of justice, misled him when he was interviewed for the job of Tory press chief. Cameron denied that he had made any...
THE US’ largest labour federation plans to mount an aggressive campaign against voter identification laws in a half-dozen battleground states that will be key in the presidential election. AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker told reporters on Tuesday that the labour federation will have boots on the ground...
GREEN party MP Caroline Lucas has called for a parliamentary inquiry into the case of an undercover police officer and his possible involvement in the firebombing of a department store back in the 1980s. This case involved an agent from the anti-terrorist squad of the Metropolitan Police infiltrating a small...
OXFAM warned yesterday that the ‘UK could return to inequality levels not seen since Victorian times’. Government rhetoric about ‘making work pay’ – used to justify sweeping welfare reforms – is sounding increasingly hollow, according to a new report by Oxfam, which details how getting a job in modern Britain...