Monthly Archives: September 2012
NUT Wales has welcomed the Welsh Government’s recommendation that the WJEC seeks to re-award its GCSE English Language examination following the row over the way C and D grade boundaries were changed. The changes, which were not communicated to students sitting the exam or their teachers, resulted in thousands of...
‘WE ARE concerned that the implementation of the Health & Social Care Act risks the fragmentation of patient care highlighted in this report,’ Paul Flynn, Deputy Chair of the BMA’s Consultants Committee, said yesterday. He was responding to the report by the Royal College of Physicians (RCP), Hospitals on...
IN a historic crime a new report paves the way for the sell-off of England’s Specialist Health Services. Since the passage of the Health and Social Care Act in March the coalition government have rapidly moved to implement it by contracting out swathes of community care services to private...
THE TUC Congress was dominated by the growing mass anger of the working class at the Tory-led coalition policy of wage freezing and massive austerity. On Monday, Composite Motion 1 was carried calling for coordinated strike action over wages and jobs. On Tuesday, after Balls intervened to say that he would...
TUC DELEGATES yesterday voted unanimously to defend the Welfare State, pensions, and state education. They voted for Composite Motion 8: The Welfare State which instructs the General Council to ‘coordinate the development of a campaign to defend and rebuild the welfare state’. Moving the motion PCS President Janis Godrich...
TUC delegates at their Congress 2012 in Brighton on Monday voted unanimously for motions calling for coordinated strike action against cuts in jobs and services, privatisation, public sector pay freeze and regional pay. Composite Motion 1 demands the TUC ‘works for ordinary people’ by ‘promoting fair pay and decent employment’...
COMMENTING on the latest Education at a Glance report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Christine Blower, General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said: ‘The NUT supports its assertion that the social segregation within our schools should be a key concern of UK policy...
THE President of the German bosses association ASSON has called for Greece to be turned into a huge ‘Special Economic Zone’. Hans-Peter Keitel, President of the Federation of German Industries (BDI), proposed in an interview published on Monday on Spiegel-on-line that the whole of Greece should be turned into...
LABOUR shadow chancellor Balls was booed at the TUC Congress in Brighton yesterday when he made it clear that a Labour government would carry on with Tory cuts in jobs, pay, pensions and public services to prop up bankrupt capitalism. Congress gave its reasoned reply when it voted for...
DELEGATES at the TUC Congress 2012 in Brighton yesterday voted unanimously for composite Motion 1, which calls on the TUC to give its full support to workers taking strike action against cuts and coordinating unions to take strike action. This came after TUC President Paul Kenny announced that Motion...
THE Tory-led coalition is pushing full steam ahead with its plans to completely smash up the health and safety legislation and leave hundreds of thousands of workers completely unprotected. This week ministers will announce that thousands of businesses, described as ‘low-risk’, will be exempt from health and safety inspections from...
TUC delegates at the opening of the Congress in Brighton yesterday supported the Young Socialists lobby which demanded ‘Youth Demand a Future, Youth Demand Jobs’. There was widespread support for the demand for TUC action in defence of London Metropolitan students, 2,600 of whom are threatened with being deported. More...
SOME 2,000 local residents, trade unionists, youth and their families turned out on Saturday for a ‘Picnic with a Purpose’ outside St Helier Hospital in Sutton south west London. The protest, organised by two young local mothers Michelle Baker and Karen Russel from Morden, was to raise funds and build...
TODAY at 9am the TUC General Council is discussing a motion from the Prison Officers Association (who have no right to strike) that urges the 2012 Congress to consider the practicalities of a general strike against the government’s austerity programme. The TUC’s general council was split down the middle on...
THE TUC General Council is meeting in Brighton at 9.00am today to discuss a resolution calling for it to consider the practicalities of a general strike to combat austerity, after being split down the middle over the resolution at its eve of Congress meeting on Thursday 6th September. The General...
THE euro strengthened to a two-month high against the US dollar yesterday, as investors’ euphoria overflowed at the ECB’s plan to purchase bonds from debtor states. This was despite the fact that the German Bundesbank denounced the plan as the inflationary printing of billions more euros, and...
HEALTH bosses have now confirmed that they are pushing forward with their plans to close three children’s wards in SW London including all of the services here at St Helier, warns Epsom and St Helier Unison branch. The warning comes ahead of Saturday’s mass protest against the planned closure of...
THE Royal College of Nursing (RCN) yesterday warned that local pay will harm patient care. It did so as it slammed the plan by 20 South West England hospitals to slash pay rates and break with national pay agreements. Its briefing paper called ‘South West Pay Cartel – the health economy...
SPANISH 10-year bond yields fell yesterday to 5.77%, below 6% for the first time since May, while yields on the equivalent Italian bonds fell to 5.19%. This was the momentary reaction to the European Central Bank (ECB) president Mario Draghi unveiling a multi-billion ‘unlimited’ debt bond-buying plan, aimed at easing...
THE UK economy will contract by 0.7 per cent this year, the OECD said yesterday, in a sharply revised prediction from that made in May, when it forecast UK growth of 0.5 per cent. The OECD (Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development) also cut growth forecasts for other major developed...
THE appointment of Jeremy Hunt as Secretary of State (SoS) for Health, is a declaration of war on the NHS. Hunt is a right winger who has gone on record calling for denationalisation of the NHS and its replacement with an insurance based health system. (‘Direct Democracy.’ 2005) He was one...
ASSOCIATION of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) president Hank Roberts last night alleged that there is a widespread theft of tax-payers’ money by schools which will get worse as more and more academies and Free Schools report directly to the Department for Education without any local oversight. Speaking at...
PROPONENTS of the two-state solution to Palestine, that is the creation of two separate states, Israel and Palestine through peaceful negotiations, with East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital, have received a very bloody nose at the hands of President Obama and the Democratic leadership at the US Democratic convention. The...
A GROUP of 106 South African mineworkers, arrested following the police shooting at UK-based Lonmin’s Marikana mine, were released yesterday by the Ga-Rankuwa Magistrate’s Court. Two more men were still in hospital, and have yet to be released. Another 162 men were released on Monday. They were...
THE parents of Britain’s poorest children are going hungry so that their children have some food on the table. Both parents and children are missing regular hot meals, unable to afford warm coats and new shoes and suffering enormous emotional strain, according to a new report from the Child...
A LEAKED email sent to the Greek Ministries of Finance and Labour from the Troika mafia in Brussels says Greek private sector workers must be made to work six days a week and work 13-hour days. The letter, which was published on August 31, shows that the Troika has ordered...
THREE THOUSAND striking platinum miners marched to the Marikana Lonmin mine and forced the massed ranks of the riot police to retreat yesterday at midday. It was the biggest demonstration at Marikana since police shot dead 34 miners last month, sparking outrage. The strikers called on the small number of non-striking...
MORE than 200 students, lecturers and other workers demonstrated angrily outside the Home Office yesterday afternoon, denouncing the plans to deport up to 3,000 London Metropolitan University students. Ayoula Onifade, President of the London Met National Union of Students, told the rally: ‘They are playing with people’s lives. This is...
Film shot by Research Journalism Initiative and placed on YouTube, shows Israeli soldiers using Palestinian children as human shields in Balata refugee camp in the occupied West Bank in 2007. The Israeli veterans’ organisation Breaking The Silence has published new testimonies from Israeli soldiers about the maltreatment of...
THE Tory-LibDem Coalition’s £20 billion NHS budget cuts are leading to nurses having to clean toilets and mop hospital floors it emerged yesterday. A survey of 1,000 NHS nurses and health assistants by the Nursing Times found that a third had cleaned toilets or mopped floors in the past 12...
HEALTH Secretary Andrew Lansley has been demoted to the role of Leader of the House of Commons. This is after his health goose was cooked by the massive hostility of the working class and the middle class, led by the BMA doctors, to his health privatisation measure, the Health and...
ANGRY London Metropolitan University students are rallying outside the Home Office in Marsham Street in central London at 1.00pm today, determined to defeat the coalition government’s massive attack. Last Thursday, London Met had its licence to sponsor the visas of international students revoked, with the UK Border Agency (UKBA) accusing...
ARCHITECT of the hated Health and Social Care Act, Andrew Lansley was sacked as Health Secretary and replaced by Murdoch acolyte and former Arts Secretary Jeremy Hunt yesterday in Cameron’s Cabinet reshuffle. Chris Grayling replaced Kenneth Clarke as Justice Secretary, and Transport Secretary Justine Greening was sacked along with Environment...
OVER 200 Gambians and supporters marched from Parliament to the Commonwealth Headquarters in Pall Mall calling for the ousting of President Alhaji JJJ Jerehmeh yesterday. The marchers shouted: ‘Down with Dictatorship – Democracy Now!’, ‘Jerehmeh is a Murderer – He Must Go!’ and ‘Commonwealth Must Act!’. An organiser of the march,...
TRADES unionists, their families and supporters gathered in Burston village near Diss in Norfolk on Sunday for the annual rally and march to commemorate the famous Burston School strike. The Burston school strike from 1914 to 1939, by pupils and their parents in support of their school teachers Mr and...
DISMANTLING our state education system and parcelling it off to unelected, unaccountable sponsors is a disgrace,’ Christine Blower, General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers said yesterday. She was condemning the opening of 55 new ‘Free Schools’ this week, in addition to the 24 existing ones. Free Schools, which are...
TEACHERS in England returned to work this week facing an all-out assault on their jobs, their pay and the very existence of free state education from the Education Secretary, Michael Gove, and the coalition government. From this week, new powers have been introduced to make it easier for head teachers...
EDUCATION Secretary Michael Gove’s plans for schools to be run for profit and to end state education as we know it must be resisted, says Hank Roberts, incoming president of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL). Roberts, who takes over as ATL President on 1 September, says: ‘I warned...
SOUTH AFRICAN prosecutors yesterday ‘provisionally’ dropped murder charges against 270 miners, 34 of whose colleagues were shot dead by police last month. Many of the dead miners were shot in the back as they ran away from the armed police, but 270 of their their comrades, some of whom had...
THE UN’S International Labour Organisation has issued a dire warning of the disaster that will follow on from Greece being evicted from the EU or from a eurozone split into two warring groups, ‘the creditor states of the north and the debtors of the south’. Last month’s figure for the...
THREE thousand Beccles residents have demanded to know why £2m of taxpayers money is being spent on a ‘Free School’ with only 68 pupils. The Department of Education (DoE) says that the ‘Free School’ to be set up in Beccles Suffolk will still open this September, despite the fact that...
SQUATTING in a residential building in England and Wales has become a criminal offence, meaning squatters would face six months in jail, a £5,000 fine, or both. Campaigners warned the new law will criminalise vulnerable people and lead to an increase in rough sleeping. Currently squatting is treated as a civil...
THE genocidal Sri Lanka military occupying the country of Eezham Tamils is routinely engaged in repeated sexual abuse of the former female members of the LTTE to see them pregnant by the Sinhala soldiers says Tamil Net. Many former female cadres of the LTTE are repeatedly abused with the aim...