Monthly Archives: October 2012
RAIL unions demanded the immediate renationalisation of the railways yesterday after the Stock Exchange announced that the Virgin Trains privateer is to be asked to continue to run the West Coast Mainline for at least another nine months. Mick Whelan, Aslef General Secretary said: ‘It’s just act five in the...
ISRAEL is gearing up for another major attack on the Gaza Strip to try and drive back the revolutionary forces in the area. At the same time, the Israeli leadership has been accused of plotting to replace President Abbas, who has raised the need for Palestinian recognition in the...
THE local community, backed by Unison, has launched a campaign to stop the privatisation of the patient transport service (PTS) within Greater Manchester. At a public meeting at Manchester Town Hall tonight, Labour’s Shadow Health Minister, Andrew Gwynne MP, will join campaigners to set out the next phase in...
NEW research published in The Lancet has uncovered the hidden health toll that refugee life in Lebanon has taken on more than 400,000 Palestinians. The British medical journal has published a series of papers drawn from a meeting of public health researchers, The Lancet-Palestine Health Alliance, in Beirut in March...
The European Union has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for ‘six decades of work in advancing peace in Europe’, according to Thorbjoern Jagland of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, who added: ‘Since 1945 reconciliation has become a reality.’ Try telling that to the workers of Greece and Spain who are...
BRITISH Gas yesterday announced six per cent increases to the gas and electricity prices it charges customers, adding £80 a year to the average dual fuel bill. The UK’s biggest energy supplier, which reported £345m profit in the first half of the year, said the increase would come into effect...
SYRIAN transport minister Mahmoud Saeed yesterday accused Turkey of ‘air piracy’ over its forcing down of a Syria-bound passenger aircraft travelling from Russia. Turkish jet fighters threatened to shoot the plane down if it did not land in the Turkish capital. Saeed said that Ankara’s move ‘amounted to air piracy which...
UNIONS are furious at the plans to make savage cuts in the NHS in Northern Ireland. The plan, called ‘Transforming Your Care’, is based on closing hospitals and providing acute health care in far fewer hospitals, closing down many residential care homes and ‘ensuring that more services are provided in...
OVER 60,000 workers and youth, in angry and militant mood, defied the riot police and demonstrated at a rally in front of the Vouli (Greek parliament) in Athens against the visit of German Chancellor Angela Merkel last Tuesday afternoon. The rally was organised by the GSEE (Greek TUC) and...
THE Tory conference this week stepped up its vicious attack on teachers and their unions with education secretary Michael Gove treating them, as befits a Thatcherite, as ‘the enemy within’. Gove’s outburst was aimed at the two largest teaching unions, the NUT and NASUWT, whose members last month commenced...
ALREADY soaring food prices are set to rocket as winter approaches, the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) warned yesterday, saying wheat yields in England are down 15% to 1980s levels. World food prices are also being driven up by the rise in grain costs following the worst drought in 50 years...
IN its just-published Global Financial Stability Report, the IMF has found that ‘Confidence remains fragile despite recent policy actions’, and that the ‘Euro area crisis is the principal risk amid internal capital flight’, while the ‘Emerging markets are susceptible to shocks from Europe’, meaning that the United States and...
UNISON has launched a campaign to save patient transport services in Greater Manchester and stop them from being sold off to a private company. Last week it was announced that bus privatteer Arriva has been awarded ‘preferred bidder status’ on a three-year contract for non-emergency patient transport in...
OVER 60,000 workers and youth in angry and militant mood participated on Tuesday afternoon at a rally in front of the Vouli (Greek parliament) in Athens against the visit of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The rally was organised by the GSEE (Greek TUC) and ADEDY (public sector trades union...
A NEW report has exposed the growing homecare crisis where shorter and shorter visits mean that homecare workers cannot provide proper care, leaving the elderly and vulnerable in a dire state. Shocking examples are revealed including a care worker who was forced to leave a 93 year old women in...
IN an attempt to show some class war steel, Chancellor Osborne began his speech at the Tory Party conference with an assault on a former Tory government, that of Edward Heath. Osborne said: ‘In 1972, when a Conservative Prime Minister, two years into office, was faced with economic problems and...
THE US economy will fall off the ‘fiscal cliff’ when automatic spending cuts and tax increases kick in at the beginning of next year, the IMF has warned. Unless it delays these measures ‘the US economy could fall back into recession’, plunging the world into deep slump. The IMF also found...
THE GSEE (Greek TUC) has declared that it intends to defy today’s ban on demonstrations and marches which was announced by Athens Area Chief of Police late yesterday morning. The police chief claimed the ban, which coincides with the visit of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and covers a large area...
‘WITH this abhorrent proposal, the Chancellor is saying that some children will be marked out from birth as second class citizens with their lives worth less than others.’ Alison Garnham, Chief Executive of Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG), was denouncing Osborne’s speech to the Tory Party Conference in Birmingham yesterday,...
IN HIS speech to the Tory faithful yesterday the Tory chancellor, George Osborne, made it absolutely clear that he is going to grind the unemployed and low-paid into the ground in order to pay back the bankers. Announcing that the coalition are preparing to make cuts of £16 billion to...
PRIME minister Cameron yesterday revealed on the eve of the Tory Party conference that the government is planning to slash welfare by another £16 billion before the next election. Particularly targeting young people, poor families and the unemployed, the plan is to cut housing benefits for the under-25s. benefits for...
THE Troika of the IMF, the ECB and the EU have imposed such a massive austerity programme onto the backs of the Greek working class and the middle class that Greece is now exploding in a series of revolutionary confrontations that pose the working class taking power and...
UP TO 5,000 workers and local residents marched in west London against the closures of Charing Cross and Hammersmith Hospitals on Saturday. The angry demonstration assembled at Shepherds Bush Green at 12 noon before marching past Charing Cross Hospital to a rally at the Lillie Road Recreation Ground in Fulham. Saturday’s...
‘OUR NHS is in distress’, Royal College of GPs (RCGP) Chair Dr Clare Gerada has warned. Addressing nearly 2,000 GPs and health professionals at the RCGP annual national conference in Glasgow on Thursday, she said that as a result of the ‘rushed through’ Health Act, despite reassurances to the contrary,...
THERE was jubilation among a group of fifty former Mau Mau freedom fighters in Nairobi yesterday as news broke that a torture victims compensation trial had been given the go-ahead. In an historic judgment, the UK High Court yesterday rejected the British government’s attempt to strike out the claims of...
THOUSANDS are marching through west London against hospital closures today, determined that Charing Cross, Hammersmith, Central Middlesex and Ealing hospitals will not close. Today’s march assembles at Rockley Road, off Shepherds Bush Green at 11am and marches past Charing Cross Hospital to a rally in Lillie Recreation Ground nearby. It follows...
IN HIS first interview since becoming the coalition Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt spelt out bluntly that capitalism could no longer afford a national health system and that its budget would be cut to pay for the debt crisis. Dispensing with the usual lies that the government had ‘ringfenced’ the £110...
THE CALL for European-wide, co-ordinated strike action to defeat the EU ‘austerity’ measures made by the leader of the Greek TUC is a sure sign that the working class throughout Europe is on the march toward revolution. The Greek power workers union YENOP, the most powerful union in Greece last...
CASES of torture in police stations continue in Egypt despite an uprising that ostensibly began against police brutality, Amnesty International says. The recent case of death by torture inside a police station occurred in the area of Meit Ghamr on 16 September. Amnesty International released two reports on Tuesday on Egypt,...
THE British Medical Association yesterday expressed concern for the future of the NHS, after Health Secretary Hunt signalled more savage cuts. A BMA spokesperson said: ‘It is extremely worrying to hear that the Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, cannot guarantee real-term budget increases for the NHS after 2015. ‘The NHS is likely...
SYRIA’S Foreign and Expatriates Minister Walid al-Mua’llim on Monday delivered a speech before the United Nations General Assembly. He warned: ‘Instead of seeking to contribute to the settlement of regional and international disputes by peaceful means, some well-known countries continue to pursue new colonial policies based on political hypocrisy in...
TUESDAY'S speech to the Labour Party conference has been greeted with an outpouring of joy from the leadership of the trade unions and the bourgeois press, all of whom hailed it as providing a ‘vision’ for the country and a way out of the economic crisis that is smashing...
‘RENATIONALISE West Coast and all the other franchises under one single umbrella, and end the profiteering and chaos of rail privatisation once and for all.’ This was the demand by RMT General Secretary Bob Crow yesterday after the decision to award the multi-billion-pound West Coast Main Line rail franchise to...
INQUEST has launched a damning new report exposing the fact that after an inquest into a death in police custody, there is no mechanism to stop exactly the same situation from happening again and again. In the report called: ‘Learning from Death in Custody Inquests: A New Framework for Action...
YESTERDAY Labour leader Ed Miliband delivered his keynote speech to the party conference in which he firmly aligned himself with every reactionary anti-working class policy of the Cameron government. The entire speech revolved around just one theme – that we are all in it together and we all need to...
LABOUR leader Miliband adopted the traditional Tory slogan of ‘One Nation’ at the Labour Party Conference in Manchester yesterday. ‘In this most difficult economic time we’re going to change things,’ Miliband said, ‘and here’s how we’re going to change things . . . just think of the Olympics and the...
WORKERS at the Greek Finance Ministry early on Tuesday morning occupied the Finance Ministry building in central Athens. They are protesting against huge wage cuts and mass sackings planned by the Greek government under orders from the EC-IMF-ECB troika. The decision to occupy was taken at a joint meeting of three...
Shadow chancellor Ed Balls provoked the fury of the unions at the Labour Party Conference in Manchester yesterday with his refusal to pledge a future Labour government to end the public sector pay freeze. Having been booed by delegates at the TUC Conference in Brighton last month, Balls proceeded to...
The Serco-led public-private partnership which runs London’s St Thomas’ and Kings College hospitals’ path labs, GSTS Pathology, has run into trouble having made a loss of £6m in 2011. Freedom of Information requests have revealed that turnaround times for pathology results have been too slow 46 times in 2011 and...
Yesterday the NHS was officially opened up by the coalition government to the vultures of the private healthcare industry, whose only aim is to make millions off the backs of the sick. October 1st was the day when the NHS commissioning board took up the legal responsibility for dishing out...
LABOUR Party leader Miliband hit out at the trade unions yesterday, accusing Unite leadder Len McCluskey of being ‘wrong’ to oppose a public sector pay freeze. Interviewed on the BBC Andrew Marr show yesterday morning, Miliband said: ‘He is entitled to his view but he is wrong. ‘We’ve got the right...
PRESIDENT Putin has accused the West of pursuing policies that had destabilised states in the Arab world and now risked creating chaos in Syria. ‘The most important thing is that our partners cannot stop themselves,’ news agencies quoted Putin as saying at his local Moscow residence at a...