Monthly Archives: August 2012
ACCORDING to William Hague, the Tory Foreign Minister and Acting Prime Minister, Britain has a ‘legal obligation’ to extradite Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to Sweden, from where he will be extradited to the US. To fulfil this ‘legal obligation’, Hague and the government are prepared to storm the Ecuadorian embassy...
The FBU and the Chief Fire Officer met this week and agreed a way forward to maintain fire cover within East Sussex. Recently, East Sussex Fire and Rescue Service (ESFRS) managers have failed to maintain fire cover within towns and villages of the county. When challenged over their decisions by the...
THERE are nearly one-and-a-half million workers and youth in the UK who want full-time work but are working part-time because they cannot find full-time jobs. This is shown in the unemployment figures released by the Office for National Statistics yesterday. According to yesterday’s figures, the number of people out...
Rail unions, transport campaigners and passenger groups held a national day of action on Tuesday to protest against massive hikes in rail fares, widespread planned sackings of 20,000 railway staff and a slashing of services which threatens to leave most stations unmanned. July’s RPI inflation was announced on Tuesday as...
‘UK unemployment falls to 2.56 million’, is the fraudulent headline, with Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith declaring: ‘It’s the private sector one should take our hats off to’ – making a sick joke out of the suffering of workers and youth under the conditions of...
THE eurozone economy shrank in the third quarter from April to June by 0.2%, with France having a third consecutive quarter of no growth at all. Even Europe’s biggest economy, Germany, grew by just 0.3%. In the previous quarter there was zero growth over the seventeen states that use...
305 THY (Turkish Airlines) workers who were sacked because they rose against the banning of their strike action in the aviation industry by law, keep their struggle on. As Hava-0 (Civil Aviation Workers Union) members they have not left the Ataturk Airport’s International Flights Terminal since they were fired. They demand...
HEALTH workers have angrily condemned the decision by administrators now running the bankrupt South London Healthcare Trust to close the gynaecology ward at Queen Mary’s Hospital, Sidcup. The decision means that women, including those who have cancer or have suffered a miscarriage, will be transferred to a surgical ward...
IT’S ‘make or break’ time for UK manufacturing, according to the authoritative Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), an organisation not noted for issuing dire warnings about the state of the British economy. The reason for their lack of post Olympic optimism lies in a survey they carried out...
JOBCENTRE staff who deal with calls from people entitled to benefits and crisis loans went on strike yesterday over oppressive working conditions and unrealistic targets. More than 6,000 PCS members in 32 call centres in England, Scotland and Wales reignited industrial action first taken last year against draconian conditions that...
A SENOR Fatah official said Saturday that the Palestinian Authority supports Egypt’s efforts to shut down a tunnel network under the border with the Gaza Strip, prompting outrage from the territory’s Hamas government. Fatah’s Tayyeb Abdul Rahim, who also heads the president’s office, said the PA considers the tunnels ‘pathways...
MAINTENANCE staff at three Lincolnshire hospitals are taking industrial action today, as they face a loss of about £1,700 to their incomes. The electricians, plumbers, technicians and maintenance staff at Boston, Grantham and Lincoln hospitals will be ‘working to rule’, as they had their national recruitment and retention premium...
THE position of the imperialist powers in Afghanistan has become completely untenable. Their forces are not wanted either by the Taleban or the mass of the population. Increasingly the occupiers are being killed by their own allies, often while they are ‘training’ them, hammering home the point that...
‘We’re here, the Syrian community, at this protest organised by Syrian Youth in Britain,’ Danny Makki, one of over 60 mainly young people outside the Syrian embassy in London, told News Line on Saturday. Danny continued: ‘We are here in solidarity with the Syrian people in rejection of new unprecedented...
KELLOG, Brown and Root (KBR) is on the shortlist for the ‘Business Partnering for Police’ (BPP) project. It is the company which pleaded guilty before an American court to engaging in a scheme between 1994 and 2004 to bribe Nigerian officials with significant financial payments in order to secure business. The...
SINCE last Saturday the Athens-wide pogrom against immigrant workers, codenamed Xenios Zeus and carried out by thousands of armed police, has rounded up over 7,500 migrant workers according to Amnesty International. Of these, about 2,000 did not possess validated documents. On Thursday morning armed police surrounded a train at the...
THE British government has responded to the success of the Syrian government in driving the Al Qaeda-supported Free Syrian Army out of Damascus, and liberating major areas of Aleppo, by stepping up its support for the Free Syrian Army to the tune of £5 million. The priority of this government...
IN temperatures of 42 Celsius in the shade, over 1,000 striking bank workers of the Agrarian Bank (ATE) and of the Postal Bank (TT) yesterday jointly marched through the streets of central Athens. They were continuously shouting rhyming, witty and very militant slogans against the sell-off of the two banks...
PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka has written to home secretary Theresa May to highlight serious concerns over the privatisation of a government helpline and to advise her of a forthcoming legal challenge. The letter concerns the transfer of helpline staff from Equality and Human Rights Commission offices in Birmingham, Cardiff...
GLOBAL food prices rose sharply in July. The wild swings in weather conditions are responsible says the UN food and agricultural body. The July price rises are enormous. Cereal prices surged 17%, while sugar leapt 12% to new highs from the previous month, after rains hampered sugarcane...
THE Governor of the Bank of England yesterday poured gallons of ice cold water over the prospects of British and world capitalism. King cut the projected growth of the UK economy for 2012 from a puny 0.8% to near zero, preparing his listeners for a deepening slump and an actual...
SAVAGE ‘austerity’ cuts to prop up bankrupt capitalism and its banks are being met with a revolutionary response from workers and youth throughout Europe. In the UK, over 500,000 marched in London when they got the call from the TUC on March 26 last year. Youth rose up last August,...
THE LibDems, who sealed the coalition by stabbing millions of youth in the back by agreeing to tuition fees of up to £9,000 a year and then voting for the privatisation of the NHS in the House of Commons, are now squealing ‘betrayal’ – after the Tory leader has...
GREEK armed riot police squads assisted by other police units yesterday continued, for the fourth day running, the biggest pogrom against immigrant workers and their families in Athens. Code-named Xenios Zeus, it is being carried out under the pretext of searching for ‘illegal immigrants’. Literally thousands of police, with vans and...
JULY 31 marked the 40th anniversary of a great working class victory, the release of the jailed Pentonville Five dockers in 1972. The TUC was forced to call a general strike as thousands marched on Pentonville Prison, north London, where the five TGWU militants were jailed after being convicted by...
PRISON sentences totalling more than 1,800 years have been handed to youth following the uprising after the police ‘assassination’ of Mark Duggan, in Tottenham, on 7th August last year. A year on, Ministry of Justice figures show that a total of 1,292, nearly all young people, have been jailed. Courts opened...
GREECE is currently having its books and the success of its austerity measures examined by the EU Troika, made up of the representatives of the European Union, the European Central Bank and the IMF. Greece has run out of cash and its bosses are desperate to secure another 130bn...
THIS year’s TUC Congress next month is meeting at a time when all of the basic rights and gains of the working class are under savage attack. This is by a coalition that is determined to make the working class pay for the bankers’ and bosses’ crisis. The coalition’s full domestic...
A DAY OF REMEMBRANCE was held yesterday to mark a year since the death of Mark Duggan, who was shot dead by the police in Tottenham. The refusal of the police to meet the family, at the end of a 120 strong protest march to the local police...
THOUSANDS of Greek bank workers are continuing their strike against privatisation and will be joined by Postal Bank workers who are holding a one-day strike and stoppages throughout this week. At a mass workers’ meeting last Friday in Athens the executive of the SEATE trade union at the Agrarian Bank...
THE privately-run Hinchinbrooke Healthcare Trust in Cambridgeshire has imposed a jobs freeze after making a £2.3m loss in the three months to the end of June. It is not the success story that the coalition would like people to believe. Staff now fear they face mass sackings after the Health Service...
AMMAN – The Jordanian newspaper Al-Arab al-Yawm website on August 1st wrote the following about the Syrian ‘rebellion’. ‘As the “decisive” battle for Aleppo rages now, we ask: where is the “Syrian revolution?” The revolution is the people, first and foremost. But the people of Aleppo are fleeing, once from...
US President Barack Obama has signed a covert, secret order authorising the CIA and other US state agencies to support the Syrian counter-revolutionaries, the Salafists, Jihadists and Al-Qaeda fighters. They are from everywhere except Syria, and are seeking to do the same job that they did for NATO in...
THE BANK of England and the European Central Bank were yesterday paralysed in the face of the rapidly deepening crisis of the world capitalist economy. The Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) voted to maintain the official Bank Rate paid on commercial bank reserves at 0.5 per cent. The MPC...
THE Syrian Army killed tens of insurgents yesterday during clashes in the Syrian city of Aleppo in the northwest of the country. The government forces yesterday managed to destroy the telecommunication system the insurgents had been provided by one of their sponsors, Turkey. The Syrian security forces are continuing their...
THIS week the ‘big guns’ of the capitalist world banking system will each be holding their regular monthly meetings with only one question on the agenda – how to deal with the twin crises of international debt that is bankrupting entire countries while simultaneously attempting to stop the complete...
PALESTINIANS for Dignity’ reject the EU’s hypocrisy in upgrading its relations with the Israeli Occupation. ‘It has come to light over the last week that the European Union (EU) has decided to upgrade its trade and diplomatic relations with the state of Israel despite the latter’s intensification...
THE first private company to run an NHS hospital claims it has cut waiting times, improved care and delivered savings in its first six months. Circle has run Hinchingbrooke Hospital in Cambridgeshire since February. Regional NHS officials monitoring Circle say the company has made a good start, while warning that improvements...
THE daily picket to stop of Chase Farm Hospital will be marking its 150th day by mid-August. Organised by the North East London Council of Action, it has grown in strength as staff members, patients and local residents have expressed their determination to defeat the plans to close the hospital’s...
EUROZONE manufacturing activity has hit a three-year low at the same time as the banking crisis is reaching explosion point. Greece has run out of cash and requires an immediate 130bn euros, while Spain requires hundreds of billions of rescue cash. The system is rocking, the tremors are...