Monthly Archives: June 2013
DOCTORS at the BMA Annual Representative Meeting in Edinburgh have voted no confidence in the CQC (Care Quality Commission) and have declared the organisation ‘not fit for purpose’. Citing the recent scandal of poor standards at Winterbourne View care home, Bristol GP Mark Corcoran said the CQC had inspected the...
HUNDREDS of hospital workers staged a rally outside the Greek Health Ministry in Athens last Thursday morning against the planned closure by the coalition government of about 12 hospitals in the capital during the summer. The hospital workers’ federation POEDIN had called a half-day strike. Hospital workers participated in the...
THE Joseph Rowntree Foundation has found that living costs have risen 25% in the past five years and placed an ‘unprecedented’ financial burden on the poor. It added that rising childcare and energy costs, coupled with stagnating wages and benefit cuts, widened the poverty gap. Report author Donald Hirsch said:...
ON June 11, the Greek coalition government took the unprecedented decision to close the national TV station in Athens and sack the workforce of over 2,000 workers. News Line interviewed Panayiotis Kalfayannis, President of POSPERT (Federation of Media Trade Unions) and leader of the TV workers who explained the...
CHANCELLOR Osborne’s vicious £11.5 billion Spending Review attacks on pay, public services and benefits, were immediately condemned by trade union and TUC leaders representing millions of workers on Wednesday. The University and College Union (UCU) said the chancellor’s decision to open his speech by lamenting the policy of loading debts...
THE Labour shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, engaged in a nauseating charade on Wednesday of verbally attacking his Tory opposite number whilst at the same time making it clear that he was in complete agreement with him. This feat of duplicity masqueraded as the Labour response to Osborne’s Spending Review, which...
TENS of thousands of teachers across the North West took strike action yesterday. This was a further step in the NASUWT and NUT teacher unions’ dispute with education secretary Gove over pay, pensions, working conditions and jobs. Some 2,765 schools in 22 local authorities were affected by the strike, which was...
OVER two thousand teachers held a ‘March for Education’ organised by the London Region National Union of Teachers in central London on Tuesday night. Angry teachers chanted ‘Hey Ho, Gove has got to go!’ as they marched down Victoria Street to hold a rally in Westminster’s Emmanuel Centre. Newham NUT...
IN HIS Spending Review of yesterday, drawn up at a time when the capitalist crisis is deepening, with inflation rising and the banks warning of a new crash, Chancellor Osborne opted for massive cuts of up to 10% in government departments to slash a further £11.5bn from government spending Public...
CHANCELLOR Osborne launched a massive new attack on the working class and poor yesterday, with his £11.5 billion Spending Review onslaught on pay, public services and benefits. He started off by announcing pay cuts for millions of health, education and other public sector workers, stating: ‘Public sector pay rises will...
EGYPT’S defence minister Abdel Fattah al-Sisi warned last Sunday that the army will intervene if violence breaks out in the country where rallies are planned against President Mohamed Mursi this month. On the eve of the first anniversary of Mursi taking power, he said any demonstrations would be an ‘attack...
ON Monday, the BMA conference (ARM) passed unanimously a vote of No Confidence in the Tory-led coalition’s Health Secretary, Hunt, and also called for the repeal of the Health and Social Care Act (under which the NHS is being privatised) and ‘for a coordinated campaign to achieve that aim.’ The...
DOCTORS at the BMA conference (ARM) yesterday voted for Motion 293 from the London Regional Council ‘to resist cuts and the privatisation of the NHS’. The Resolution added: ‘That this Meeting notes that the NHS is under immense strain as it strives to make unprecedented “efficiency savings” of £20 billion...
WORKERS at South African Airways (SAA) are threatening to go on strike if their salary increase demands are not met. The workers are calling for a 9% salary hike, but this was dismissed by SAA which initially offered a 3% increase. However, following a meeting at the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation...
THE Bank of International Settlements (BIS) has broken ranks with the IMF and the World Bank and issued a grim warning to the ruling classes of the planet This is that Quantitative Easing (QE) and its consequence, soaring bond yields, will lead to trillions of dollars in losses for the...
ANGRY doctors yesterday delivered a vote of No Confidence against Tory Health Secretary Hunt. Doctors at the British Medical Association’s (BMA) Annual Representative Meeting (ARM) in Edinburgh cheered as they voted unanimously for motion 22. This noted ‘the Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt’s attack on the NHS and his comments about mediocrity...
HEZBOLLAH’S deputy leader Shaykh Na’im Qasim said last Wednesday that his group had fought ‘with honour’ in Syria and had helped in the transfer of wounded Syrian rebels in accordance with the party’s religious beliefs. ‘We fought with honour because we were clear about our involvement in Syria...
MlLIBAND, Balls and co are like circus performers on the highest of high wires, being buffeted by a huge economic gale that is pauperising millions. As jobs and living standards plunge, they advocate getting rid of all safety nets, especially the Welfare State and its universal benefits, and allowing...
‘COME and get it if you dare!’ was the defiant reply of the ERT (Greek state TV and Radio network) workers’ union POSPERT to a Finance Minister’s order issued last Friday to all ERT employees to ‘abandon’ the occupied ERT building in Athens. The finance minister’s order was issued as...
THE health services in England and Wales and Northern Ireland are in massive crisis. In February, The Francis report on Mid Staffordshire hospital (MSH) exposed, again, how the trust was driven to cut staff in order to save money to become a foundation trust (FT), resulting in 1,200 excess...
COUNCILS in England face a 10% cut in funding from central government as part of the coalition’s spending plans for 2015/16. As well, there will be a major breach of health budget ring-fencing. Communities and Local Government Secretary Eric Pickles has already accepted in principle that his £21bn budget will...
THE workers’ occupation of the Greek State TV and Radio (ERT) has led to the collapse of the Greek tripartite government. Foris Kouvelis, the leader of the Democratic Left, one of the junior government partners, stated late on Thursday night that his party’s ministers ‘are being withdrawn’ from the...
THE AFL-CIO trade union federation in the USA has given its support to the Turkish trade unions and workers and youth who have been struggling against the Erdogan dictatorship. Its statement said: ‘Over the past few weeks, Turkey has been rocked by unrest. ‘The protests were sparked by peaceful resistance to...
IT REALLY doesn’t take very much to send the international capitalist money markets into a state of panic, as the US Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, found out last Wednesday night. He delivered his monthly resume of the Fed’s latest analysis of the state of the US economy and reported...
NEWS LINE is pleased to publish extracts from Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s interview with the German Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper. Interviewer: ‘Mr President, you have rejected any form of foreign intervention and have warned that this would extend the battle to wider areas, have you reached this?’ President Assad: ‘Let’s be...
THE Brazilian government is deploying heavily armed troops to five main urban centres that are the driving force of the present uprising by the working class, the youth and the poor of the country. The Brazilian revolution is the latest in the chain of revolutions by the working class,...
THE occupation of the Greek State TV and Radio network building HQs (ERT) completed eight days and nights on Tuesday and has entered a most critical stage of its development. The Greek government is insisting that ERT is shut down with all its 2,800 workers sacked while a much smaller...
AN Alexandria misdemeanors court on Sunday overturned jail sentences for five workers from the Alexandria Container & Cargo Handling Company. The court had sentenced the five workers in absentia last September to one to three years in prison for inciting a strike, in addition to fines of LE10,000 each. AN Alexandria...
NATO has handed over security for the whole of Afghanistan to the Afghan puppet government for the first time since the Taliban were ousted in 2001. US commanders are insisting however, that there must be peace talks with the Taliban, so that a coalition regime can be formed as the...
THE leaders of the eleven TV, Radio and newspaper media trade unions issued a ‘Victory at ERT’ (Greek State TV and Radio network) statement on Monday. This followed the decision by the Council of State (the Greek High Court) which ordered the ‘suspension’ of last week’s decision by the Greek...
TENS of thousands of workers and youth mass day and night in the grounds around the occupied Greek State TV and Radio (ERT) building in Athens which has become a revolutionary centre of resistance against the parliamentary junta imposed on Greece by the troika of the EC-IMF-ECB. They are listening...
THE Labour shadow education minister, Stephen Twigg, made a speech yesterday that was billed as ‘wresting’ the initiative on education from the Tories – in fact, it represented the wholesale acceptance of their policy to force academy status on every single primary and secondary school in the country. Twigg not...
ALL SCHOOLS will be academies under a Labour government, the party’s education spokesman, Stephen Twigg said yesterday. Academies, which are privately-run but state-funded, operate outside of local authority control, set their own curriculum and decide their own school terms and the length of school days. They set their own pay...
OVER 200 striking refuse workers, who have already endured three years of pay freezes, defiantly marched with their supporters through Brighton and Hove on Saturday against vicious council plans to impose massive £4,000-a-head wage cuts. The march came the day after GMB members employed at Cityclean by Brighton and...
HASSAN Rouhani has hailed his election as Iran’s president as a ‘victory of moderation over extremism’. The cleric won just over 50 per cent of the vote, and so avoided the need for a run-off after a campaign that held one hand out to the large numbers of Iranian workers...
THE Greek State TV and Radio building in northern Athens has become a revolutionary centre of resistance against the parliamentary junta, imposed on Greece by the troika of the EC-IMF-ECB. Tens of thousands of workers and youth mass day and night in the grounds around the building listening and taking...
PRIME MINISTER Cameron and Foreign Secretary Hague, despite the fact that the Tory cabinet and party are split on the issue, yesterday gave their full support to President Obama’s assertion that Syria had used poisoned gas on its citizens. Obama maintained that a ‘red line’ had been crossed, meaning that...
BY DAVID VINE AURELIE Lisette Talate died last year at 70 of what members of her community call, in their creole language, sagren — profound sorrow… Madame Talate died of sagren because the US and British governments exiled her and the rest of her Chagossian people from their homeland in the...
TENS of thousands of Greek workers and youth are congregating every day and every night at the occupied ERT (State TV and Radio) building in Athens. This has been turned into a centre of resistance against the parliamentary junta of the tripartite government of Prime Minister Antonis Samaras. ERT transmitters have...
TENS of thousands of Greek workers, youth and unemployed took part in a general strike rally yesterday in front of the occupied ERT (Greek state TV and Radio network) building in Athens. The one-day general strike was called by the GSEE (Greek TUC) and ADEDY (public sector workers’ unions...
OVER a million Greeks stopped work yesterday in a general strike while tens of thousands of Greek workers, unemployed and youth rallied in front of the ERT (Greek state TV and Radio network) building in Athens, which had been closed by the Greek dictatorship on the orders of the...
LONMIN Plc (LMI) is waiting to be served with a strike notice by the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU) if the world’s third-biggest platinum producer doesn’t agree to the labour organisation’s demands. ‘We are still waiting for the final response from Lonmin,’ AMCU General Secretary Jeff Mphahlele...
THE National Association of Letter Carriers’ (NALC) annual food drive collected 74.3 million pounds of food and was the second most successful in the programme’s 21 years. The food was used to restock food banks, pantries and shelters around the country. The total was an increase of 5% over last...
THE petty 5,000 fall in the number of the unemployed (that is the number of workless who are calculated to be looking for work) to 2.51 million is accounted for by the fact that currently there are now over one million pensioners working, and that the number of...