Monthly Archives: June 2012
CULTURE Secretary Hunt was accused of ‘lying to Parliament’ in the House of Commons yesterday, during the debate demanding that Hunt’s conduct over the BSkyB bid be investigated. However, Speaker Bercow rejected Tory demands that the Labour MP who made the charge be ejected from the House. Liberal...
THE 38 striking Sheffield recycling workers, alongside their supporters, lobbied the Labour Council at Sheffield Town Hall yesterday to demand the reversal of five sackings that have already been made, and big cuts in working hours for the remainder of the workforce. The strike, which began more than three weeks...
CHANCELLOR Osborne was in the mood for sacrifices on Tuesday and as is his way, the way of the British bourgeoisie, these sacrifices were to be made by other people, in order to safeguard the interests of British imperialism. Donning his butcher’s apron, as befits this jubilee year, he suggested...
Reductions in child poverty are being reversed by the Tory-LibDem Coalition’s onslaught on welfare benefits, a report from the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) has warned. The charity says the last government cut child poverty at a scale and pace unmatched by other industrial nations – although it did miss...
A KING’S Fund survey shows public satisfaction with the way the NHS is run fell from 70% in 2010 (the year that Tory rule began) to 58% in 2011. ‘These findings are disappointing but not surprising,’ RCN General Secretary, Dr Peter Carter said yesterday. ‘Over the past couple of years...
THE Greek leader of the Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA) Alexis Tsipras in an interview with the Athens left daily Avgi on Sunday stated that ‘we believe that the renegotiation of the terms of the bail-out Accord is the most profitable strategy for both sides,’ meaning Greece and...
GMB leader Paul Kenny has told delegates to the GMB conference that the GMB wants a greater say in Labour’s policy making process. The truth, as far as this proposition is concerned, is that it would be easier to bring the government down than to win back the trade...
The leader of the Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA) Alexis Tsipras paid a long electioneering visit on Monday to the Athens area Police HQ building (GADA). Both the police and their headquarters are absolutely hated by Greek workers and youth as the centre of the barbaric attacks, with clubs...
‘NO fault dismissal will allow employers to sack people where their faces don’t fit,’ Paul Kenny, leader of the GMB public service union warned yesterday. Kenny denounced Business Secretary Cable’s announcement of a ‘no fault dismissal’ clause in the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill, which had its Second Reading in...
The political crisis for the European bourgeoisie deepened yesterday following the results of exit polls at the end of the first round of voting for the French National Assembly. These polls predicted an outright win for the new French President Francois Hollande’s Socialist Party at next Sunday’s final round of voting,...
THE Eurozone has agreed to lend the Spanish banks up to 100bn euros without demanding any austerity measures after Spanish Economy Minister Luis de Guindos confirmed a request for financial assistance. De Guindos said there would be no austerity conditions. The austerity-free loan has touched off demands from Ireland,...
THERE was fury across Spain yesterday after prime minister Mariano Rajoy hailed a eurozone ‘lifeline’ of up to 100 billion euros ($125 billion) to save the country’s stricken banks as a victory for Spain and for Europe. Workers are angry that the rescue fund amounts to 21,000 euros of new...
KARL MARX was able to show that one of the fundamental contradictions of the capitalist system was the conflict between the need of the productive forces to develop and the private ownership of the means of production and the capitalist nation state. This contradiction showed itself first of all...
LEFTIST SYRIZA leader Alexis Tsipras addressed a crowd of party supporters in Sparti, in the Peloponnese, on Thursday night. Tsipras said that his party would not fire any civil servants if it comes to power and would conduct its own evaluation of public sector employees, ending the cooperation that Greece...
THE Greek economy fell further into deep recession in the first quarter of the year, according to the Greek Statistics Authority (EL.STAT.) who announced a 6.5 per cent drop in the country’s GNP in the first three months of this year. Estimates based on this figure predict a six per...
THE New York Times has revealed that the United States and Israel were behind the Stuxnet virus cyber-warfare attack on Iran and its nuclear facilities. The leak has driven the Republican right wing, led by John McCain, into a furious declaration that: ‘This is not a game. This is far...
BY CLARE SAMBROOK BACK in January, I reported here on the wretched experience of a boy apprehended by the UK Border Agency at Dover who complained of a bleeding anus, asked to see a doctor, but was first subjected to Border Agency interrogation without benefit of legal representation or support...
THE Bank of England yesterday left UK interest rates unchanged at 0.5 per cent and announced no expansion to its quantitative easing (QE-printing money) programme. A Bank statement said: ‘The Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee today voted to maintain the official Bank Rate paid on commercial bank reserves at...
THE sense of panic and of impending doom is running wild amongst the international banks and the world bourgeoisie as they are forced to confront the reality of capitalism crashing around their ears with nothing that can be done to prevent it. This panic is reflected in the contradictory demands...
THE Greek Statistics Authority (EL.STAT.) has announced that the official unemployment rate for last March rose to 21.9 per cent, a huge increase compared to the 15.7 per cent rate of March 2011. Last February’s rate was 21.4 per cent. These figures mean that some 1.1 million workers are officially...
LORD Prescott has demanded an inquiry into appalling treatment of unpaid ‘volunteers’ on the government’s slave labour ‘work programme’. They were bussed up to London from the West Country on Saturday night to work as ‘stewards’ during the Queen’s Jubilee on Sunday. Prescott has written to Home Secretary May after becoming...
THE seven and a half month old strike at the Hellenic Steel plant in Aspropyrgos, just 20 km from Athens, has been declared by a Greek single judge court as ‘illegal’ last Tuesday. It follows last Sunday’s ruling of another court which branded the coach drivers’ national strike also...
THE Jubilee ‘celebrations’ have turned out to be a petty, momentary diversion for sections of the middle class, away from the real drama of the death agony of the European Union and the world capitalist system, which is now taking place for all to see. The rapid emergence...
THE announcement that the western and Saudi-Qatari backed ‘opposition’ in Syria is no longer committed to the UN Security Council-backed Annan ceasefire comes as no surprise. In fact, it has never backed the ceasefire. The western powers’ propaganda machine, including the BBC, has been boasting that this ‘opposition’ movement has...
Syria declared the ambassadors and envoys from several western states unwelcome yesterday, ordering them out of the country. The move followed last week’s expulsion of senior Syrian diplomats from at least 13 countries. In what it described as a reciprocal move, the Syrian government announced yesterday that 17 diplomats from the...
The National Union of Public and General Employees (NUPGE) joined thousands of Canadians opposing the Conservative budget in a mass online protest on Monday. NUPGE joined with faith groups, trade unions, associations, businesses, First Nations, environment groups, human rights groups, pro-democracy groups and seniors, across the country, to say: ‘Silence...
Financial leaders of the G7 group of industrialised nations held an emergency ‘teleconference’ on the worldwide economic crisis yesterday. Canada’s Finance Minister, Jim Flaherty, warned that the eurozone is on the brink of collapse. ‘The real concern right now,’ he said, ‘is that some eurozone countries have not taken sufficient action...
A Greek single judge court on Sunday ruled ‘illegal’ a four-day national strike declared by the coach drivers’ federation of trades unions to demand the signing of a collective agreement. The coach drivers’ federation had accepted a 20 per cent wage cut but the employers wanted much more: a 70...
Serco, the country’s top privateer in the NHS and other public services, is under investigation over allegations that it ran an ‘unsafe’ GP out-of-hours service in Cornwall by cutting staffing levels to the bone. It is further alleged that in order to cover up this situation, Serco has manipulated data...
TWO weeks before the Greek general election, due on June 17, Alexis Tsipras the leader of Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA) last Friday launched his party’s ‘updated’ programme for a ‘Left’ government whose ‘very first act will be legislation to annul the EC-IMF Accord and its enforcement...
BILLIONAIRE financial speculator George Soros warned yesterday that the German economy is going to totter in the Autumn, when the crisis will ‘come to a climax’ and claimed that there are just three months before the euro could collapse. And Nobel Laureate in Economics Eric Maskin said he thought that...
SYRIAN ‘rebels’ yesterday announced that they are no longer committed to the Annan plan. Major Sami al-Kurdi, for the rebel military council stated that they have decided to end their commitment to this plan, starting from last Friday. Kurdi announced that they wanted the international community to take ‘bold’...
Quebec students and their supporters took to the streets of Montreal last Saturday and promised a summer full of demonstrations unless the dispute over tuition fees is resolved. The long list of grievances offered by protesters was further evidence that the conflict extends far beyond tuition fees. ‘This isn’t a student...
HUNDREDS of thousands of Egyptian workers and youth have re-occupied Tahrir Square in disgust at the light sentencing of ex-president Mubarak and at the former Mubarak regime’s Prime Minister, Ahmed Shafiq’s, participation in the presidential election run-off. Shafiq will compete against the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice party candidate...
SPEAKING at the International Institute for Strategic Studies conference in Singapore last Friday, US Secretary of Defence, Leon Panetta, made it clear that the US is undertaking a strategic shift in the disposition of its gigantic naval forces. He opened stressing ‘the importance that the United States places...
PRESSURE is mounting on the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) to consider another round of emergency Quantitative Easing (QE – printing money) at its Thursday meeting, as the UK and eurozone crises mount. Bourgeois analysts believe that the MPC could add a further £50bn to the current...
HOME Secretary, Theresa May has ordered a new ‘QC-led review’ into allegations that police corruption hampered the original failed investigation, nineteen years after the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence. The announcement came in response to calls from the Lawrence family for the allegations of malpractice to be assessed independently. A...
LABOUR is to demand a parliamentary vote over Culture Secretary Hunt’s breaching of the ministerial code, by refusing to take responsibility for the actions of Adam Smith, his special adviser in the BSkyB affair, and for misleading the House of Commons. The prime minister, Cameron, maintains that the Culture Secretary...
UK bosses yesterday warned that the deepening UK slump will see unemployment soar further to 2.9 million next year. The manufacturing sector turned in its worst performance for three years in May, according the latest Markit/CIPS survey. Its manufacturing Purchasing Managers’ Index dropped to 45.9 in May, down from 50.2...
NURSES in South West England are furious over leaked plans to sack and re-hire them on lower pay and worse conditions. The government is considering introducing regional pay for public sector workers and the South West could be among the first areas to have it introduced. A leaked document from...
THE Palestinian Authority civil affairs minister said late Tuesday that Israel will return the bodies of 91 Palestinians buried in an Israeli cemetery on Thursday. Hussein al-Sheikh released a list of names agreed with Israel, whose remains will now be handed to the PA in what the minister described...
THE head of the European Central Bank (ECB), Mario Draghi, has pronounced the Eurozone to be ‘unsustainable’ in its present form, while the EU Finance minister, Olli Rehn, demanded that Eurozone countries impose even more austerity measures on their working class if the Eurozone is to avoid total disintegration. They...