Monthly Archives: November 2012
UNEMPLOYMENT benefit claimant numbers soared in October with the number of people claiming benefit rising by 10,100, the largest increase since September 2011, the Office for National Statistics reported yesterday. The claimant count rose to 1.58 million, the highest since July. Other figures from the ONS showed that long-term unemployment –...
A 'DEBT tsunami’ is set to engulf Britain, Labour MP for Walthamstow, Stella Creasy warned yesterday. Consumer magazine Which? has just issued its Quarterly Consumer Report, which shows that 2.4 million households borrowed money from family and friends, while 11.3 million households took out additional finance. And ‘insolvency experts’ at R3...
THE UK’s CPI inflation rate rose sharply in October to 2.7%, a rise of 0.5%, following increases in tuition fees and food prices, with further huge rises in energy prices to come. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said education costs rose by 19.1% last month after the government lifted...
inflation leapt last month on the back of a 20% hike in education costs and soaring food prices. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) inflation rate rose to 2.7% in October, up from 2.2% the month before, while the Retail Prices Index (RPI) rate...
The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) warned yesterday that the NHS is ‘sleepwalking into a crisis’, and demanded immediate action to stop trusts cutting vital posts and services. The RCN’s Frontline First campaign has identified more than 61,000 posts across the NHS in England that are now at risk or...
‘Firefighters wages make up over three-quarters of fire and rescue service budgets, so cuts to fire service funding invariably mean cuts to firefighters jobs’, said the Fire Brigades Union introducing a briefing issued for a lobby of MPs last Wednesday. In London alone 17 fire stations have been earmarked...
Last Friday the administrator brought in to wind down the collapsed electrical retailer chain Comet announced that 330 staff would be made redundant with immediate effect, with all 236 stores set to close with the loss of 6,500 jobs. With this massive jobs loss and with customers being told that already...
THE TUC has sent letters to the Spanish and Greek governments urging them to abandon their austerity programmes and to ‘change course now’. The letters have been written as part of the run up’ to the 14 November ETUC Day of Action against austerity, for jobs and growth. TUC General Secretary...
TEACHERS and heads yesterday condemned Cameron’s announcement that 400 ‘failing’ state primary schools will be forced to become privately-run academies. National Union of Teachers General Secretary, Christine Blower said: ‘There is no evidence to show that academy status in primary schools will bring any educational benefits. ‘Despite this the coalition government...
THE crisis of the capitalist state is rapidly deepening after the just-appointed ex-Director General of the BBC, George Entwistle, was publicly put to the sword by interrogator John Humphrys. This was done on the Today programme, last Saturday morning, when he was made fully responsible for the latest episode...
OVER 2,000 workers and youth marched to city hall Norwich in opposition to the English Defence League on Saturday. This is the first time that the fascists have chosen to march in Norwich and people were shocked. The counter march gathered in Chapelfield gardens at 11am and a series of...
THE BBC must undergo a radical overhaul said chairman of the BBC Trust Chris Patten yesterday. Speaking in the wake of Saturday evening’s resignation by just-appointed George Entwistle as BBC Director General, Patten said yesterday: ‘If you’re saying, does the BBC need a thorough structural radical overhaul, then absolutely it...
UNISON said yesterday that it was truly shocked by the scale of job losses and call centre closures announced by NHS Direct, warning that it is a disastrous move for patients and staff. This came as NHS Direct announced that twenty-four out of thirty call centres will close, and 50...
THE HSBC bank, the biggest bank in Europe, says it is looking into allegations that it has set up a large number of offshore accounts in Jersey for criminal gangs to launder ‘dirty’ money’, the profits made from drugs and people trafficking. HSBC bank has just put aside a...
250,000 workers, youth and professionals demonstrated outside the Vouli (Greek parliament) in central Athens last Wednesday evening against the Austerities Measures Bill. They were demanding the overthrow of the tripartite coalition government. The action was called by the GSEE (Greek TUC) who organised a two-day general strike last Tuesday and Wednesday....
THE report by the National Audit Office (NAO) into the running of Hinchingbrooke Hospital in Cambridgeshire gives official and damming evidence of the plundering of the NHS by the private health companies. Hinchingbrooke was the first hospital in the country to be put out for tender last February, with private...
HUNDREDS of thousands of Greek workers and youth congregated on Wednesday evening and late into the night outside the Vouli (parliament) in central Athens demanding the overthrow of the coalition government. Inside the Vouli the new barbaric Austerity Measures Bill, dictated by the hated troika of EC-IMF-ECB,...
250,000 workers, youth and professionals demonstrated outside the Vouli (Greek parliament) in central Athens last Wednesday evening against the Austerities Measures Bill and demanding the overthrow of the tripartite coalition government. The action was called by the GSEE (Greek TUC) who organised a two-day general strike last Tuesday and Wednesday. The...
‘THE National Audit Office (NAO) report into the running of Hinchingbrooke Hospital by private company Circle, should act as a warning of the dangers of bringing the private sector into the NHS,’ Unison warned yesterday. The union added: ‘There is still a big question mark over the long-term financial viability...
‘CUTS will cost lives,’ Fire Brigades Union (FBU) general secretary Matt Wrack insisted yesterday. He was addressing a 500-strong rally in Westminster of FBU delegations from across the UK before a lobby of MPs to demand they stop savage fire service cuts going ahead. He added: ‘A significant factor in the...
RMT MEMBERS at DHL’s Neasden depot, supply chain partners of Marks and Spencer’s, will strike again for 24 hours this Friday and Monday in an on-going dispute over pay and conditions. Following a unanimous vote for action, and a rock solid strike on the October 22nd, RMT’s executive has instructed...
OBAMA’S re-election is a product of the refusal of US workers to allow an all-out robber baron of capitalism, Romney, to have control over their jobs and lives during the period of a huge capitalist crisis. It was very much a win for the lesser of the two evils as...
THE French Socialist government has said it will raise Value Added Tax and cut public spending, kicking the working class and the poor in the teeth, in order to fund tax credits, and boost big business profits to try to persuade the bourgeoisie to keep their plants in...
SCOTLAND'S hospital doctors began balloting for strike action yesterday, against the Scottish government’s attacks on the NHS pension scheme. If the ballot gives the go-ahead, the first day of strike action will be 12 December 2012, followed by 8th and 17 January 2013, with further strike action an option. Plans to...
THE GMB has called a meeting in Stafford on November 13th to mobilise opposition to the outsourcing of Staffordshire Education Support Services (ESS) and to the bid by Carillion, until they compensate the 224 workers they blacklisted across the UK. Staffordshire County Council are tendering to set up a new...
ABDEL-Moneim Abul-Fotouh, a physician and a former 2012 presidential candidate, has called on Eyptian president Mohamed Mursi to heed the demands of medical doctors. The doctors have been on strike for almost a month. During a meeting with Mursi on Saturday, Abdul-Fatouh, a former Muslim Brotherhood member and founder of the...
HOUSING benefit cuts being debated in parliament today and set to come into force next April will see local authorities ‘decanting’ poor families out of London, the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) warned yesterday. A CPAG report, ‘Between a rock and a hard place: the early impacts of welfare reform...
LAST week the two main Greek trade union organisations representing workers in the public and private sector called a two-day general strike starting today against the new austerity measures being voted on by the Greek parliament tomorrow. Even before the official strike began, workers in public transport and the media...
ASSOCIATION of Teachers and Lecturers President Hank Roberts yesterday condemned as ‘outrageous’ an offshore company employing thousands of supply teachers avoiding the payment of millions of pounds in employer’s National Insurance contributions. The Sark-based International Subcontracting Solutions Ltd (ISS) employs more than 24,000 temporary agency workers across the UK, most...
THE Palestine National Authority President, Mahmud Abbas has just been warmly greeted as a true friend and ‘partner for peace’ by the Israeli government and the Israeli President, Shimon Peres. Abbas was asked by Israel’s Channel 2 TV whether he wanted to live in Safed, his boyhood town in...
‘SRI LANKA’s promises on human rights should no longer be accepted by the international community’, Amnesty International said in a press statement after the UN Universal Periodic Review (UPR) on Thursday, TamilNet noted. Sri Lanka’s promises on human rights should no longer be accepted by the international community, Amnesty...
EPSOM and St Helier University Hospitals Trust may be the next to enter the Unsustainable Provider Regime as was triggered for South London Healthcare Trust in July. This follows the collapse last month of formal talks aimed at merging the trust’s Epsom site with Ashford and St Peter’s Hospitals Foundation...
TEACHERS and heads unions yesterday slammed a report by regulator Ofqual that claimed teachers ‘marked GCSE coursework too generously’ and this is why results were downgraded in the summer. Association of College and School Leaders deputy general secretary Malcolm Trobe said: ‘For Ofqual to suggest that teachers and schools are...
THE US, UK, French, Turkish, Saudi and Qatari-backed ‘Syrian rebels’, who have been armed, equipped, financed and recognised as the representatives of the Syrian people by their patrons, have been accused by the UN of carrying out war crimes against the people of Syria. This belated announcement by UN officials...
US SECRETARY of State Hillary Clinton said on Wednesday that Washington wanted to help the Syrian opposition unite against President Bashar al-Assad’s regime but urged it to resist efforts by ‘extremists’ to hijack the ‘revolution’. After declaring the Syrian counter-revolution a ‘legitimate revolution’, she added: ‘There are disturbing reports of...
AFTER all of the Tory propaganda chatter about the ‘recovery has begun’ the reality is that the slump is deepening. The UK’s manufacturing sector, that is the real economy, shrank in October for the sixth month in a row. The Markit/Cips purchasing managers’ index (PMI) fell to 47.5 last...
The rendition of a Pakistani man by UK and US forces to Afghanistan, and his subsequent detention, has been described by Britain’s highest court as ‘unlawful’ and a possible war crime. Yunus Rahmatullah, 29, was detained by British forces in Iraq in 2004, and rendered by the US to Bagram...
THE British Medical Association (BMA) and the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) yesterday angrily condemned the news that the Treasury has clawed back nearly £3bn from the NHS Budget over the past two years. Dr Paul Flynn, Chairman of the BMA Consultants Committee, said: ‘The Nicholson challenge (the £20bn “efficiency...
IT says something about the depth of the capitalist crisis, and the lack of ability in the Cameron government, that Lord Heseltine, who in 1993 shut down the entire mining industry, destroying hundreds of thousands of jobs and many, many communities, is being called back from the edge...
‘WE see it as nothing but a “dirty deal” from Tesco,’ Unite shop steward Trev Cheetham said outside Tesco’s, near to Parliament, yesterday. Over 50 Tesco distribution drivers located in Doncaster, had come to demonstrate at their treatment by the superstore. They have been transferred from Tesco to Stobart and...
THE International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has condemned the suspension of Jamal Abdel Rahim, editor in chief of daily El Joumhouryia, by the Chairman of the Egyptian Shura Council. The suspension came after the state-owned paper published news on the travel-ban of former defence minister Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi and...