Monthly Archives: January 2013
THOUSANDS of Michigan citizens descended on the state Capitol last Tuesday, January 8, to show their outrage over efforts by corporate-driven legislators to pass a divisive right-to-work (for less) measure that Governor Rick Snyder signed into law last Friday afternoon. Despite suffering the indignity of being pepper-sprayed by police officers,...
ISRAELI police evicted dozens of Palestinian activists early Sunday from a first-of-its-kind protest camp they set up in a West Bank area slated for Jewish settlement. Police and activists confirmed that hundreds of Israeli police entered the campsite in the controversial E1 area on the outskirts of Jerusalem at around...
The private health companies, that are circling the NHS and salivating at the prospect of making billions of pounds profit out of the sick under a fully privatised health service, are rubbing their hands in glee at a new proposal that they should pay no corporation tax on the...
‘ONE by one, David Cameron has broken all the promises he made on the NHS. It is now struggling with his toxic medicine of spending cuts and reorganisation.’ This was the warning given yesterday by shadow health secretary Andy Burnham after Labour revealed a list of 17 hospitals judged by...
DISABLED people and supporters demonstrated outside the Norwich offices of ATOS last Friday, 11 January, to demand an end to the Work Capability Assessments (WCA) and the closure of the inaccessible ATOS office in Norwich. Mark Harrison of the Norfolk Coaltion of Disabled people told News Line: ‘I’m here...
BRITISH IMPERIALISM was run out of Basra and Iraq, and is about to be run out of Afghanistan. However, it is still organising new wars in support of French imperialism in Mali and Somalia, and in support of US imperialism in Syria. Cameron and his military chiefs have now announced...
THE Unite union yesterday called Honda’s decision to cut 800 jobs at its Swindon plant a ‘hammer blow’ to UK manufacturing and the local economy. Unite warned: ‘In reality, Honda will cut over 1,100 jobs, as the company recently announced 325 job cuts to temporary workers at the Swindon site.’ Unite...
NHS London has allocated £115 million to organise the closure of A&E and maternity services at Chase Farm Hospital, Enfield. Emergencies are to be directed to Barnet Hospital and North Middlesex in Edmonton. The Enfield A&E is to be replaced by an urgent care centre for minor injuries, open just 12...
THE PLAN to strip Chase Farm Hospital, in Enfield, of its accident and emergency and maternity services is now being implemented with health chiefs earmarking £115million for the operation. There is plenty of cash for cuts! NHS London announced on Monday that it had approved the business case for the...
THURSDAY’S announcement that seven prisons are to be closed in March 2013 will endanger the government commitment to a rehabilitation revolution, insisted the Prison Officers Association (POA). The POA said in a statement: ‘Prisoners will now be transferred into an already overcrowded and volatile prison estate. ‘Eighty-one prisons in England and...
DESPITE fears of a ‘triple dip recession’, the Bank of England has kept interest rates and its Quantitative Easing (QE) monetary stimulus programme on hold. The Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) yesterday voted to maintain the official Bank Rate at 0.5%. The Bank said its Committee ‘also voted to maintain the...
PM CAMERON received an almighty slap in the face on Wednesday when the Obama administration effectively told him to shut up and drop all talk about holding referendums on Britain’s continued membership of the European Union. Well in advance of Cameron’s much promised landmark speech on Europe due to be...
THE picket called each Wednesday by the South East London Council of Action, to prepare to defend Lewisham hospital with an occupation to keep it open, created huge interest this week, with residents and hospital workers continually stopping to lend support. The Special Administrator, Matthew Kershaw, appointed by the...
THE defence contractor which reached a settlement with alleged victims of torture in the notorious prison of Abu Ghraib is now again at the cutting edge of the ‘war on terror’ abuses, providing key components for weaponised drones, said legal charity Reprieve yesterday. It has recently come to light that...
THE National Garment Workers Federation (NGWF) Bangladesh held a symbolic one-hour hunger strike last Friday and are taking continuous actions to establish garment workers rights. Their demands include the immediate arrest and trial of Tazreen Fashion’s owner and other culprits of factory fire, payment of wages, allowances and compensation to...
WHILE the US and the UK have reduced their military spending, under pressure from the greatest ever crisis of the capitalist system, the new Japanese Liberal Democratic government has just announced that Japanese imperialism is back – by pledging to increase its military spending by $2.1 bn this New...
JAILED Palestinian Leader Marwan al-Barghouthi believes much must be carried out in 2013, starting with national reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas, the liberation of prisoners, and that it is the year for comprehensive elections and ending coexistence with the occupation. Marwan al-Barghouthi’s office released a comprehensive interview on the 48th...
STUART LAWRENCE, the brother of murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence, has complained to the Metropolitan Police that officers have stopped and searched him 25 times because he is black. Stuart Lawrence’s lawyer, Imran Khan, said that he is the victim of a sustained campaign of harassment by Scotland Yard officers...
Unions and local campaigners responded with fury yesterday after the Coalition’s ‘special administrator’ Matthew Kershaw called for the winding up of the South London Healthcare NHS trust. Kershaw said the trust, which runs three hospitals in the capital, was on the verge of ‘bankruptcy’ and should be broken up, and...
THERE is no more pathetic sight than that of European bourgeois politicians and economists manically trying to convince both themselves and the world at large that the economic crisis of capitalism is, if not over, then contained and the economic tsunami has been weathered. So desperate are the bourgeoisie of...
Public school teachers in Ontario in Canada are set to go on strike against the state government for imposing new contracts under a controversial anti-strike law. Teachers demonstrated outside the convention centre where the Liberal Party was choosing its candidate to run in prime ministerial elections. They said they want to...
SYRIAN President Bashar al-Assad on Sunday gave a defiant address to the nation, broadcast on national TV. Delivering a speech on the latest developments in Syria and the region at Dar al-Assad Centre for Culture and Arts in Damascus, President al-Assad said that ‘out of the womb of pain, hope...
SYRIAN government troops late on Sunday repulsed an attack by an armed gang on a police school in the northern city of Aleppo. This came after President Bashar al-Assad called on Syrians to fight religious extremists and terrorists backed by the US and UK. SANA news agency said members of the...
Today Parliament votes on the Tory coalition bill to place a 1% cap on all benefits and tax credits for the next three years – a vote that has been accompanied by the most frenzied attack on the unemployed and low paid by the government. Central to this attack has...
Health Secretary Hunt’s attempt to turn the report on the ‘breakdown in healthcare’ at Mid-Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust into an attack on the NHS as a whole were condemned as a ‘disgrace’ yesterday. Some details of the recommendations of the two-year Francis report into the Stafford Hospital catastrophe have...
THE final report into the crisis at Mid-Staffordshire NHS Hospital Trust is due to be published in January after a considerable delay. In fact, the results of the inquiry into the crisis in the Trust, a crisis which came to light in 2007 and which resulted in up to 1,200...
HUNDREDS of thousands of supporters of Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas’s Fatah party on Friday held their first mass rally in Gaza since Hamas took control of the territory in 2007. Hamas, in a sign of reconciliation with Fatah, permitted the rally to go ahead as the climax of...
ISRAEL plans to step up arrests of suspected militants in the occupied West Bank to prevent a rising tide of low-intensity conflict and civil unrest from turning into an uprising, security sources say. ‘There is a certain Palestinian awakening and, as a consequence, a decision was taken within the security...
MILIBAND’S Labour Party yesterday said that if it was the government it would offer the long-term unemployed a guarantee of a six-month job. This would be 25 hours of paid work a week, at the minimum wage rate, that would still require the receipt of benefits if such workers...
A SURVEY of GPs has shown that over half support the BMA organising a boycott of commissioning, with a sizeable minority supporting strike action to defend the GP contract. The survey, of 226 GPs by Pulse magazine, showed that 52% would support a call from the BMA’s general practitioner committee...
THE Coalition and its supporters are engaged in a frenzy of benefit cutting which is victimising and pauperising the working class and many sections of the middle class. The British Medical Association (BMA) yesterday condemned ‘draconian’ proposals by Tory-controlled Westminster Council to cut the benefits of claimants judged overweight...
THE New Year has kicked off with a frenzied attack by both Tory and their LibDem coalition partners on the low paid, unemployed, the elderly, families with young children and even the overweight. Leading the attack over the weekend was Tory benefits hatchet man Iain Duncan Smith who in...
Teacher hostility to the government and its policies has increased dramatically in recent months, according to a YouGov survey of 804 teachers, which was commissioned by the NUT and published on Wednesday. The survey shows a crisis of morale in the profession with the majority of teachers feeling untrusted by...
ISRAELI occupation forces issued ‘evacuation orders’ to around 100 Palestinian families living in the northern Jordan Valley, last Monday, demanding that they abandon their homes and leave the area. The orders state that Israeli troops will be holding military drills in the northern Jordan Valley and that everyone must leave. The...
US President Barack Obama has hailed the deal reached with the Republican Party to avert a ‘fiscal cliff’ of huge tax rises and spending cuts that the capitalist world feared would plunge the US and the world capitalist economy into a deeper slump. After the Republican-dominated House of Representatives passed...
‘2013 will be the year that the fight to re-nationalise the railways goes into overdrive,’ said RMT General Secretary Bob Crow yesterday. Train fare increases of an average of 3.9 per cent kicked in yesterday, with some passengers facing fare hikes of a massive 10 per cent. ‘As passengers return from...
LONDON Underground (LU) station cleaners employed by the ISS and Initial privateers on the Jubilee, Northern and Piccadilly lines held a 48-hour turn-of-the-year pay strike on Monday and yesterday. RMT members working for the two contractors did not turn up for work for two days, from 5.30am on Monday until...
AT THE last TUC Congress its leaders were forced by the anger of delegates to accept and agree a resolution that the TUC was to look into the practicalities of calling a general strike to oppose the Tory-led coalition government’s massive attacks on the trade unions and the people....