Monthly Archives: October 2013
THE College of Emergency Medicine on Monday announced guidelines titled Creating satisfaction and maintaining wellbeing in Emergency Medicine. The College of Emergency Medicine said in s statement it ‘recognises the tremendous pressures being placed on senior staff in Emergency Departments. ‘The publication last week of Stretched to the limit –...
THE TORY-led coalition is working overtime to privatise the public sector and turn it into a bonanza, a big killing for the big business speculators, as they have done in the case of the the Royal Mail, now privatised where union recognition and the current terms and conditions of...
COMMUNICATION Workers Union (CWU) deputy general secretary Dave Ward yesterday pledged that the union will defend the terms and conditions of postal workers following the Royal Mail sell-off. Addressing a mass meeting in the Mount Pleasant mail centre car park, north London, he said: ‘You know more than anybody the...
THOUSANDS of firefighters are marching on Westminster today against government cuts to the fire and rescue service and attacks on their pensions. Coachloads of firefighters are descending on London from all parts of the UK for today’s demonstration, which assembles at 10.30am in Malet St, ahead of this Saturday’s five-hour...
BY CLARE SAMBROOK THREE years after the unlawful killing of a passenger in its care, why hasn’t British Airways held an inquiry into what went wrong? What are the consequences of its inaction? Three years ago today a man called Jimmy Mubenga was unlawfully killed on a British Airways plane. This...
LONDON Hospitals are at ‘breaking point’ according to a report from NHS England over a £4 billion funding gap. NHS England (London region) director Dr Anne Rainsbury, introducing the report said that ‘A growing and ageing population, higher than ever patient expectations and zero financial growth means the NHS needs...
ANGRY crowds in Washington DC have clashed with riot police in front of the White House over the current government shutdown. A number of rallies took place on Sunday, which began at the World War II Memorial and ended at the White House gates. Frustrated with the continued shutdown and...
FIREFIGHTERS in England and Wales will strike again over government attacks on pensions next Saturday, 19 October, the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) announced on Friday. The strike will last for five hours, between 6.30pm and 11.30pm on Saturday 19 October. The FBU has organised a national demonstration in London on Wednesday...
MILLIONS of workers and youth both in Vietnam and throughout the world are mourning the death of General Giap, who led the military victory over French imperialism and the victory over the much stronger army, navy and airforce of United States imperialism. However, they are not just mourning his...
LABOUR yesterday delivered another stab in the back to workers, when two of its newly promoted shadow ministers hit out at the working class. Shadow education secretary Tristram Hunt said that Labour is ‘on the side’ of parents who want to set up schools, and would not shut most existing...
POSTAL workers were very angry when they demonstrated outside the London Stock Exchange at 7.00am yesterday morning, on the day that Royal Mail shares were sold off fast and cheap to the rich city wheelers and dealers to make vast profits through speculation. On the demonstration, John Simpkins, Division Rep...
FIREFIGHTERS in England and Wales will strike again over government attacks on pensions next Saturday, 19 October, the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) announced yesterday. The strike will last for five hours, between 6.30pm and 11.30pm on Saturday 19 October. The FBU has organised a national demonstration in London on Wednesday 16...
THE Tory-led coalition have launched an unprecedented attack on youth after endorsing a Transport Research paper that proposes that young drivers under the age of 30 will face a curfew between 22.00 and 05.00 unless a passenger aged over 30 is in their car. It also means an under-30-year-old...
‘FAMILIES are being forced to choose between staying on the right side of the law or feeding themselves,’ warned Labour’s Shadow communities secretary Hilary Benn yesterday. This came after a Labour Party survey found that due to benefit changes, 112 English councils had reported issuing 156,000 court summonses since April...
ON WEDNESDAY, Public Interest Lawyers won an important decision when the Supreme Court brought to an end a six-year legal battle by Mr Al Jedda to have his British citizenship restored. In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court confirmed that the Home Secretary acted unlawfully when she deprived Al Jedda,...
TODAY is the official starting day of trading on the stock exchange in Royal Mail shares, a sell-off that has been greeted in the bourgeois press as reviving the privatisation ‘fever’ last seen in the 1980s. According to figures released yesterday by the business secretary Vince Cable, over 700,000 applications...
THE NHS watchdog, Monitor, has proposed to import ‘production line’ surgery techniques from other countries to plug ‘gaps’ in NHS funding. Monitor’s chief executive David Bennett says that unless this is done the NHS will be bankrupted and unable to close ‘the £30bn funding gap’ by 2021. The report, entitled...
CAMPAIGNERS demonstrated outside the High Court yesterday where Ealing Council were seeking a judicial review of the decision to close Ealing Hospital A&E. They had a banner saying ‘Hands Off Our A&E’ and made clear that they are opposed to the closure of four west London A&Es, including Hammersmith, Charing...
‘PASSENGERS are still getting mugged,’ Manuel Cortez, leader of the TSSA railworkers union said yesterday after Transport Secretary McLoughlin announced that he was capping next January’s fare increases at 6.1%. Cortes commented angrily: ‘This late-running fares review is a slap across the face for millions of passengers who have seen...
THE Libyan Prime Minister Ali Zeidan, put into power by a murderous NATO campaign that culminated in the murder of Colonel Gadaffi, has called on his NATO sponsors to intervene to try to curb the growing power of Al-Qaeda and rival Islamic factions in Libya. NATO’S victory created an ungovernable...
SYRIAN President Al-Asad said that through Western support, now there are thousands of Al-Qaeda fighters from 80 countries in Syria and that terrorism must be eliminated. He was giving an interview to the German Der Spiegel News Magazine an extract of which is printed below: Der Spiegel: ‘Do you think you...
EALING Council is going to go to court today, 9 October in a bid to secure a full judicial review (JR) of plans to downgrade four major local hospitals. Previously, a judge rejected the council’s application for the judicial review of NHS plans to shut A&E departments and downgrade...
THE College of Emergency Medicine published a startling report yesterday entitled: ‘Stretched to the Limit’. It was based upon a survey of Emergency Medicine Consultants in the UK which had a 70% response rate (1077 respondents who work in Emergency Departments). It shows that overall 62% regard the job...
BOTH the capitalist class of the world and the Stalinist bureaucracy, which has been expending trillions of dollars buying US debt, are now issuing shrill warnings to the US ruling class that it must not default on October 17. This is while within the USA itself, its different ruling class...
THE warning given over the weekend by the head of one of the leading housing associations that the bedroom tax will lead to mass evictions of tenants over rent arrears is just a foretaste of the ruination the Tory-led coalition is prepared to inflict on the working class. The dire...
END 15-minute care visits, the Royal College of Nursing and Unison health unions demanded yesterday, after the scandal of the consequences of such rushed visits to elderly and disabled people was raised by a leading disabled charity. Some local authorities are now commissioning three quarters of all home care visits...
TEACHING on the cheap is selling children short: schools use teaching assistants and cover supervisors to teach children says the ATL teaching trade union. Schools are getting teaching on the cheap and selling children short by using teaching assistants, cover supervisors and higher level teaching assistants to teach...
THE Department of Health, headed by Health Secretary Hunt, has said that a proposed 1% increase in NHS staff pay was unaffordable, and is to be scrapped. Hunt is to tell the NHS pay review body to withhold the rise which in itself would be a wage cut – with...
HEALTH unions have warned that the coalition government’s moves to withdraw a previously announced 1% pay rise for all NHS staff next year are ‘inflammatory’. Over the weekend the Department of Health claimed the miserable 1% increase, following years of a pay freeze, was ‘unaffordable’ for health workers and urged...
THE US Treasury Department and the IMF have warned that if the US does not resolve its current crisis, it will unleash a global economic catastrophe that will be much worse than the world-wide financial collapse of 2008. The US government has been shut down since midnight Monday because the...
THE South African Municipal Workers’ Union (SAMWU) says about 250,000 workers from 300 areas around the country will go on strike if last-ditch negotiations currently under way fail to produce the desired results. Tahir Sema, a spokesman from SAMWU, said on Wednesday: ‘It will be a national strike, because...
THE Fire Brigades Union has organised a national demonstration in London on Wednesday 16 October. The FBU is under an all-out attack on the jobs, wages, and pensions of its members who are now menaced by plans to sack firefighters in their 50s, close large numbers of fire stations,...
TORTURE continues to be widespread in Libya’s detention centres, according to a United Nations (UN) report released today. The report, ‘Torture and Deaths in Detention in Libya,’ noted that 27 people have died in custody in the past two years, with physical abuse cited as the cause. There are an estimated...
AS the US government entered its first full week of shutdown, the ruling class in America and the world are in panic mode as an even greater economic cataclysm opens up underneath them, one that will spell the collapse of the entire capitalist system. Speaking on Wednesday, president Obama sent...
SYRIA'S President Bashar al-Assad will remain in office, and has the right to decide to run for re-election next year, Information Minister Omran al-Zohbi said on Tuesday. ‘Syria is staying put: the state, the nation, the people and the president. This is the Syrians’ choice,’ Zohbi told journalists. ‘All the people...
TORY leader Cameron treated his audience to a big dose of Tory hypocrisy yesterday, when he vowed in the final speech to the Tory Party conference to get behind business to create ‘a land of opportunity for all’. TORY leader Cameron treated his audience to a big dose of Tory...
A PAYMENT COUNCIL survey shows that more than 2.7 million people who are currently receiving benefits fear they will struggle when Universal Credit replaces their current welfare payments. Under the new scheme all weekly or fortnightly benefits are replaced by the monthly Universal Credit. Unlike Housing Benefit, it will be...
TWO COFFINS carrying bodies of migrant workers arrive every day in Kathmandu’s airport on average, and their deaths mean disaster for their families. Purna Bahadur Budhathoki makes a solemn vow, as he recalls the 12-hour days, blistering temperatures and lack of drinking water on a construction site thousands of miles...
THE US government has begun to shut itself down after the two houses of Congress failed to agree a budget by midnight Monday. The Republican-led House of Representatives had decided that defeating Obama’s healthcare reform was more important than maintaining the US government. More than 800,000 federal employees are now on...
TEACHERS took mass strike action yesterday in four large regions of the country, the Eastern region, the Midlands, Yorkshire and Humberside. They came out against the Tory government’s attacks on teachers’ pay, pensions and conditions, and over job cuts. There were big marches and rallies in Birmingham, Cambridge, Sheffield and Norwich. Over...
THE leader and four parliamentary deputies of the fascist Golden Dawn party, along with 13 party cadres and two policemen, were arrested on Saturday morning by Greek anti-terror squads and charged with ‘forming a criminal organisation’ which carried out manslaughter, extortion and money laundering, according to the High...
LONG-TERM unemployed workers and youth will have to undertake work for no pay in return for their benefits, or else starve, with the government looking on, under changes unveiled by Chancellor George Osborne at the Tory Party conference yesterday and due to be legislated by the coalition. People who are...
OUTSIDE Holloway Road Post Office yesterday pickets striking for the 13th time drew huge support from the public in opposition to the scandal of the privatisation of 70 Crown Post Offices. The striking Post Office staff said: ‘We are absolutely determined to defend this vital service’. Sandra Jolly told...