Monthly Archives: September 2012
THE House of Commons Public Accounts Committee yesterday warned of the dangers of widespread fraud in the £1bn ‘Welfare to Work’ programme. Margaret Hodge MP, its chair said: ‘Where the government chooses to use private companies to deliver public services it is essential that proper arrangements are in...
OTTAWA – Major unions have endorsed a mass sit-in to defend Canada’s West Coast from tar sands pipelines and tankers. The Communications Energy and Paperworkers Union (CEP), the Canadian Autoworkers Union (CAW), the BC Teachers’ Federation, the United Fishermen and Allied Workers’ Union-CAW, and the Canadian Union of Public Employees...
BEFORE the 1997 election, the Blair-Brown gang proved to big business that they were the right men to run capitalism by conducting a war inside the Labour Party against all things to do with socialism. This included throwing the historic Clause Four, advocating nationalisation, out of the Labour Party constitution...
THE United Nations has called on Israel to halt a series of serious violations of the Palestinian people’s human rights cited by a 2009 fact-finding mission, a UN report says. Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights, Kyung-wha Kang, presented a report to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, Switzerland,...
IN a week when Greece and Spain witnessed massive strikes and demonstrations against austerity measures – designed to drive the working class and youth into abject poverty – it became clear that, far from being a crisis that could be contained to the ‘poor south’, it is a crisis...
HUNDREDS of thousands of workers, youth, self-employed and small shopkeepers took part last Wednesday in the mass and militant demonstrations throughout Greece as part of the one-day general strike called by the GSEE (Greek TUC) against the new savage austerity measures of the three-party coalition government. In Athens over 100,000...
UNITE’S leadership said it wants ‘full involvement’ in the negotiations over the axing of 275 managerial, supervisory and engineering jobs announced by Ford in the UK yesterday. The sackings are part of the 500 such job cuts across Ford’s Europe operations announced yesterday. The union claimed the sackings, at Ford’s Warley...
ATHENS riot police were firing rubber bullets and tear gas at workers and youth near to the Athens parliament building during yesterday’s general strike. Clashes erupted during the first trade-union-led general strike action since the conservative-led coalition came to power in June. An estimated 100,000 people have joined...
THE Sri Lankan military on Sunday dismantled the Cheddiku’lam Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp and forcefully removed the inmates, without making any permanent arrangement for their resettlement or return to their original villages. The most seriously affected group are the villagers of Keappaa-pulavu of Mullaiththeevu district, whose village...
YESTERDAY Greece was hit by a massive general strike with tens of thousands of workers marching in Athens demanding that there be an indefinite general strike to bring down the Greek government – which is now the local quisling agency of the EU-IMF-ECB axis, complete with appointed leaders...
IMF CHIEF Christine Lagarde opened her speech of last Monday in Washington with a dose of false optimism. She said: ‘Let me begin by saying that many of the right decisions have been taken. Most recently, initiatives by major central banks – the European Central Bank’s OMT bond-purchasing programme, QE3...
BY LINAH ALSAAFIN PALESTINIAN hunger striker Bilal Diab went without food in an Israeli prison for 77 days incarcerated without charge. Diab won his struggle and was released last month on August 9th. Linah Alsaafin, a graduate of Birzeit University and a writer based in Ramallah, interviewed the victorious...
A REPORT published yesterday by Stanford University and New York University warns that the CIA’s drone campaign ‘terrorises men, women and children’ in North-West Pakistan ‘twenty-four hours a day’. The campaign is ‘damaging and counterproductive’ and neither policy-makers nor the public can ‘continue to ignore evidence of the civilian harm’...
GOVERNMENT plans for ‘postcode pay in the public sector’ are unfair and would be bad for NHS patients and schoolchildren in poorer areas, according to polling published by the TUC yesterday. Almost two-thirds (65 per cent) of respondents in the poll – carried out for the TUC by pollsters Survation...
THE Education system is ‘sleepwalking towards centralisation’ with up to 24,000 schools and governing bodies accountable solely to the Secretary of State. New research, conducted by the think-tank LGiU in partnership with the NUT and Unison, has found that there has been a massive rise in the number of Academies...
THE week long closure of the two remaining GM owned Vauxhall plants in the UK at Luton and Ellesmere Port which started yesterday marks a new and decisive stage in the collapse of the European car industry under the impact of the world crisis. It is also a forceful and...
‘NATIONAL Action is needed to defend the NHS & stop hospital closures!’ was the title of the resolution that was carried unanimously at a packed 150-strong Conference called by the North East London Council of Action in Enfield on Sunday afternoon. The resolution warned: ‘We now have a government that...
DOZENS of Palestinian youth gathered outside the Ramallah offices of the European mission training the Palestinian police on Friday morning, to protest Europe’s policies in Palestine. Activists chanted ‘We don’t want euros and dollars, we want revolution and revolutionaries’, and ‘Europe go home, our prisoners need a final decision’. European officials...
THE Portuguese government has agreed to look for alternatives to th social security tax rise, just one week after huge anti-austerity street protests shook the regime to its core. The plan was to raise contributions next year from 11% to 18%, so as to meet the conditions of Portugal’s international...
Dr Kevin O’Kane, chairman of the London Region BMA told its Annual Business Meeting on Thursday night that London Region felt let down and ‘betrayed’ by the BMA Council. He said: ‘At the ARM (Annual Representative Meeting) in June, the motion calling for further action over pensions was passed almost...
BILLIONAIRE brothers Charles and David Koch could be the poster boys for the big money special interests that are dumping hundreds of millions of dollars in this year’s US elections on the national and state levels, says the AFL-CIO trade union federation. Last week it was reported that the American...
UK PUBLIC sector borrowing has hit a record high of £14.4bn. After more than two years of Tory austerity measures, the deficit for August is the biggest for that month since records began. Corporation tax receipts fell by 2.1% while benefit payments rose by 4.9%, as hundreds of thousands...
THIS Sunday, 23 September, NE London Council of Action have called a Conference to discuss national action to defend the NHS. It is being held at St Michael's Church Hall, Gordon Hill, Enfield EN2 0QP from 3-6pm. Every day the Council of Action holds a picket of Chase Farm hospital...
THE Palestinian Authority in the West Bank faces a $400 million budget shortfall, even if current donor pledges are met, the World Bank warned in a report on Wednesday, calling new funding ‘critical.’ The 21-page report, prepared ahead of a meeting of international donors in New York next Monday, also...
AT the end of August the EU-imposed Greek prime minister, Antonis Sameras, announced to a disbelieving populace that the £9.3 billion cuts imposed on the country as the price demanded by the international banks and EU for the latest bail-out, ‘will be the last’. On Tuesday of this week the...
THE NHS is sitting on £4 billion of reserve cash whilst unprecedented government cuts of £20bn have doubled the number of hospitals falling into financial crisis, an Audit Commission report on the NHS financial year has revealed. Hospitals are being put into administration and privatised whilst the NHS has money...
GAMBIAN President Yahya Jammeh’s conditional moratorium on executions of death row prisoners leaves at least 38 people at great risk of execution, Amnesty International said today. On the evening of Friday 14 September, President Jammeh announced a moratorium on executions as the deadline he set for all death sentences to...
‘ANY attempt to break national pay rates must be met by the TUC calling an indefinite general strike to bring down this Tory-LibDem Coalition Government,’ ATUA National Secretary Dave Wiltshire said yesterday. Public sector unions and the TUC condemned a call made by 25 senior academic economists in a joint...
THE victory of the strike of the Lonmim miners will inspire not just the workers of South Africa and Africa as a whole, but the working class of the world. The miners fought on despite the treachery of their original union leadership of the NUM and COSATU whose leaders collaborated...
Thirty years ago this week, up to 3,500 Palestinian civilians were systematically slaughtered in Sabra and the Shatila refugee camp in south Beirut. The brutal atrocity was carried out by Lebanese Christian Phalange militiamen under supervision of the occupying Israeli army. The full Israeli/Phalange horror took some days to emerge into...
SO FAR trillions of pounds have been spent by the state, using taxpayers’ money, to rescue, prop up and save bankrupt banks and bankers, and the big bosses. The ruling class propaganda about individuals standing up, showing their independence and making good through hard work is just pap, to...
IN A MOVE to devastate the finances of some of the poorest people in the country, the Coalition Government is planning to break the link between the inflation rate and benefit payments. Currently, benefits rise in line with inflation on an annual basis. But it emerged yesterday that the government is...
JULIA TOMLINSON walked out in anger yesterday from the Metropolitan Police Disciplinary Inquiry into the role of PC Harwood in her husband’s death crying ‘Whitewash!’ and ‘Cover-up!’ Harwood admitted two of the three allegations against him so that the panel found him guilty of gross misconduct, and as a result...
THE Tory pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, is a man on a mission – a mission to drive the unemployed, low paid and youth into the gutter and keep them there by the iron boot of the state. This determination to create a climate of fear amongst every worker has...
THE strikes that have halted work at seven of South Africa’s gold and platinum mines have spread to the chrome sector. It emerged yesterday that miners at Samancor Chrome’s mine near Mooinooi, northwest of Johannesburg, stopped work last Friday demanding a minimum take-home pay of 12,500 rand ($1,560), the same...
CHARGES against two journalists detained after they applied for permission to hold a peaceful protest over the executions of nine death row inmates must be dropped by the Gambian authorities, Amnesty International said last Friday. Baboucarr Ceesay, the First Vice President of The Gambia Press Union (GPU) and Abubacarr Saidykhan,...
IT HAS emerged that the US-UK forces lost six Harrier jump jets – completely destroyed with two more badly damaged – in the highly professional Taleban raid on Camp Bastion, which NATO could not prevent happening and during which NATO was unable to defend its assets on the base. The...
THE EU-IMF-ECB-imposed Greek Prime Minister, Antonis Samaras, on Saturday called for more time to carry out savage austerity cuts, warning that a Greek exit from the euro would be a ‘catastrophe’. Greece is currently trying to finalise a package of 11.5bn euros (£9.3bn) of spending cuts over the next two...
TRADE unions yesterday reacted angrily to the latest attack on employment rights announced by Business Secretary Vince Cable. The TUC warned: ‘Government plans to reduce payouts for unfair dismissals will do nothing to boost economic growth, and make it easier for bad employers to mistreat their staff.’ Under the government’s proposals,...
BANK SHARES rose rapidly yesterday with the news that the Federal Reserve Bank is to open up the inflationary floodgates and re-prop up the banks by spending over a trillion dollars buying dud mortgages. The Fed is to inject $40bn (£25bn) a month into the US economy indefinitely, allegedly until...
HEALTH workers, trade unionists and local residents spoke out in support of the policy of occupying Ealing Hospital to stop the closure on the eve of the mass march from Southall Park to Ealing Common in west London today. North West London NHS plans to close the Accident and Emergency...
A REPORT issued by the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) this week exposes the appalling state of hospitals in England as the NHS is cut to the bone by the coalition government’s ‘austerity’ drive to slash public spending and divert money into the banks. Such is the crisis facing hospitals...