Monthly Archives: March 2014
THE British Medical Association (BMA) is today warning against NHS charging. Responding to Lord Warner’s call to introduce charging patients a monthly fee to use the NHS, Dr Ian Wilson, Chairman of the BMA’s Representative Body, said: ‘Lord Warner’s conclusion that the NHS is being driven into a worsening...
THE Home Office’s forced deportation of 19-year-old female Mauritian student Yashika Bageerathi was stopped yesterday after Air Mauritius refused to fly her. Yashika, who remains in Yarl’s Wood Immigrant Detention Centre, Bedfordshire, where she has been incarcerated since 19th March, was scheduled to be on a flight from Heathrow at...
THE barrage of propaganda from every mouthpiece of the capitalist class that the economic crisis of capitalism is over, suffered a blow last week with the publication of a year long survey showing that the crisis is in fact deepening across Europe. The survey, conducted by the charity Caritas, focused on...
THE Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu) wants to expand the platinum sector strike. ‘We have filed an application with Nedlac (National Economic Development and Labour Council) in Rosebank,’ Amcu president Joseph Mathunjwa said on Thursday. ‘We want our workers in the gold and coal sectors to join us,’...
THE news that the coalition government has been forced to retreat over its proposed cuts to legal aid fees by the decisive actions of lawyers is a powerful demonstration of just how weak the government really is when faced with a determined stand. Yesterday, the Justice Secretary Chris Grayling was...
ISRAELI troops who shot dead a Palestinian teenager in the occupied West Bank last week, used live bullets against innocent youth without warning, an Israeli rights group said last Wednesday. After investigating the March 19 death of 15-year-old Yussef Sami Shawamreh, the human rights organisation B’Tselem said it had found...
THE UK’s current account deficit was larger than expected in the final quarter of last year, official figures have shown. The deficit in the three months to December was £22.4bn, only marginally lower than the all-time high of £22.8bn recorded in the previous quarter. Economists had expected the UK’s deficit...
SCHOOLS were closed or disrupted across England and Wales on Wednesday as hundreds of thousands of angry teachers took part in a one-day strike called by the National Union of Teachers over pay, pensions and workload. Pickets were out early morning before lively mass marches and rallies. ‘Gove out!’ was...
THE coupist regime in Kiev has reached a preliminary deal with the International Monetary Fund to try to unlock $27 billion of ‘international support’ to avert a complete collapse of the Kiev regime. The government in Kiev reached a staff-level agreement with the Washington-based lender for a two-year loan of...
A DEMONSTRATION in Wakefield will be held today into the delay by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) on whether it will launch a full inquiry into what happened at Orgreave during the 1984 miners’ strike. The Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign (OTJC) is holding a second demonstration at the...
THE SCANDAL involving police corruption deepened yesterday after the Independent newspaper revealed the existence of a secret investigation, ‘Operation Zloty’, that uncovered dozens of corrupt detectives who were in the pay of the criminal underworld. This further indictment of the Metropolitan Police comes after it came to light that an...
HEALTH Secretary Hunt is urging the NHS in England to reduce the number of serious mistakes being made and save 6,000 lives over the next three years by NHS staff and NHS Trusts ‘Signing up for Safety’. NHS staff and NHS users will be furious that what is still the...
ZERO-HOUR contracts have risen sharply in recent years, hundreds of thousands of zero-hour contract workers, the majority being young, are on minimum wage whilst simultaneously not given enough hours per week to ensure their families are financially secure, a new report highlighted. The Report was published on Tuesday by the...
HUNDREDS of thousands of teachers are striking against government attacks on their terms and conditions today, with mass marches planned in towns and cities throughout the country. The London demonstration assembles at 11.30am in Duchess Street, W1 and marches to Downing Street. Tom Davies, past president Ealing NUT, told News Line:...
THE House of Commons Defence Committee came out in favour on Monday of continuing massacres of people in Afghanistan, Pakistan and other places by drones being operated from the UK by people who have been recruited into the armed forces after they have proven their proficiency as killers in...
ON UN World Water Day last Saturday the Palestinian Mission UK recirculated a previously published brief by the PLO-Negotations Affairs Department entitled ‘Israel’s Exploitation of Palestinian Water Resources’. ‘The World Health Organisation recommends a minimum domestic waterconsumption of 100 litres percapita per day. ‘The average individual Palestinian domestic consumption, at 70...
THE head of London’s police is going to be questioned today about the destruction of a ‘lorry-load’ of evidence of widespread police corruption and criminal activity. Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe will face questions from a committee of MPs over why the information was destroyed in a two-day...
ACCORDING to the BBC Panorama programme, broadcast last night, the NHS is being defrauded of £5 billion a year, a massive loss to a budget that is being steadily cut year-on-year by the government’s austerity measures. This amount, which is twenty times the government’s official figures, would pay for 250,000...
RECENT Israeli actions against the Palestinian people indicate that Israel has given priority to settlement expansion and the demands of settlers over peace and negotiations, a top PLO negotiator said on Sunday. Member of the PLO Executive Committee Saeb Erekat made his remarks during separate meetings with Luxembourg’s foreign minister...
MEDICAL secretaries mounted a lively lunch-time demonstration outside Crawley Hospital in West Sussex yesterday against Surrey and Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust’s decision to outsource the typing of patient letters. The Unison members won great support from passing motorists honking their horns as protesters shouted: ‘What do we want? No Outsourcing!’ Addressing...
CITING ‘doctors’ deep sense of outrage’, BMA Chair Mark Porter has written to health secretary Hunt urging him to reconsider this year’s real-terms pay cut. Porter’s letter said: ‘I am writing to place on record the deep sense of outrage felt by many doctors at the decision of the Department...
NATO’S military commander in Europe has issued a warning to Russia about the build-up of its forces on Ukraine’s border. Supreme Allied Commander Europe, Gen Philip Breedlove, said NATO was in particular concerned about the ‘threat to Moldova’s Trans-Dniester region . . . The (Russian) force that is at the...
OUTGOING Treasury Secretary Martin Parkinson is right to highlight the impact deep public service cuts are having on the bureaucracy’s ability to do its job, says Australia’s Community and Public Sector Union. As the tally for federal public sector job cuts under an Abbott government passes the 5,000 mark, the...
EU leaders yesterday signed an Association Agreement with the Ukrainian coupist government. It is a watered-down version of the agreement that the overthrown President Yanukovych refused to sign, an action that saw the EU and the US organise armed fascist bands to bring down his government on February 22,...
SUFFERING a decisive and humiliating defeat at the hands of the Afghan people has in no way diminished British imperialism’s appetite for military adventures designed to re-colonise the world, in this case West Africa. Indeed, according to a report yesterday from the influential Foreign Affairs Committee of MPs, the forced...
ATHENS – Greek state secondary school teachers threatened with the sack occupied the private office of the Reforms Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis last Thursday in Athens. Some 2,000 state secondary school teachers have been placed by the Greek government on the so-called ‘mobility schemes’ and are to be sacked this Monday....
ONE in five students is living in vermin-infested homes, a new study published by the National Union of Students revealed yesterday. The shocking new research was published in a report entitled ‘Homes fit for study’, which also revealed that over three quarters of students have a problem with the condition...
THE THREE G4S guards who unlawfully killed Jimmy Mubenga in 2010 – when he was just 46 years old – using restraint holds as they were forcibly deporting him on board a plane that was due to take off from Heathrow to Angola, have at last been charged with...
Unions have condemned the Chancellor’s 2014 austerity Budget with Unison calling it a ‘clear provocation’, the NUT saying it was ‘more of the same’ and the GMB stating that it reeked ‘of the stuck-up complacency of the well-heeled elite’. TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady described the Budget as: ‘A pre-election...
TORY Chancellor Osborne’s class war Budget yesterday had at its centre a Welfare Spending Cap of £119.5bn for 2015-16. The limit on total welfare spending will be set by the chancellor at the beginning of each parliament and if the limit is breached the chancellor will have to explain why...
A 48 HOUR strike by civil servants in Greece was launched yesterday as the government negotiates further austerity measures with the troika. This followed a 24-hour action on Tuesday which seized most of the country. Tuesday’s strike brought services at tax offices and local government buildings across the country to...
OSBORNE’S BUDGET speech was devoid of any attempt to analyse the world crisis that is gripping capitalism and which is deepening by the hour, and impacting on the UK by the minute. The Bank of England has just changed its overall leadership in an attempt to keep the wolf of...
UP TO A thousand Prison Officers marched down Whitehall to a rally at Westminster on Budget Day yesterday. Prison Officer’s Association (POA) rep at HMP Bullingham told News Line: ‘We are campaigning because we think 68 years is too late for a prison officer to retire. ‘Prison Officers are dealing...
‘LORRYLOADS’ of documents were shredded by the Metropolitian police over the course of two days, including documents relating to the Stephen Lawrence case, a corruption inquiry has uncovered. The destruction of the files was highlighted by the barrister Mark Ellison QC in his review of the Stephen Lawrence murder...
JUST BEFORE his talks with President Abbas on Monday, President Obama said: ‘I think everybody understands the outlines of what a peace deal would look like, involving a territorial compromise on both sides based on ’67 lines with mutually agreed-upon swaps, that would ensure that Israel was secure but...
HALF a million people will take to the streets today, Wednesday 19 March, in demand for youth jobs, the National Union of MetalWorkers of South Africa (NUMSA) has announced. A NUMSA statement on Monday said: ‘This coming Wednesday (19 March 2014) close to 500,000 people will take to the streets...
THE report by the charity Oxfam entitled ‘A Tale of Two Britains’ puts definite figures on the simple fact known by every worker that the rich and super-rich are creaming off vast wealth while the working class is being relentlessly driven into poverty. According to the report, published this week,...
VENEZUELA’s President Nicolas Maduro has urged the United States to discuss ‘peace and sovereignty’ in a high level commission mediated by the Union of South American Nations (Unasur). Maduro also called on President Obama not to heed US factions that he says want to kill the Venezuelan leader. Venezuela blames the...
RELATIVES of people who died in police custody yesterday insisted that reforms pledged by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) be implemented without delay and for police to be prosecuted. Following a review launched in Autumn 2012, the IPCC yesterday publishes its report into the way it investigates deaths, signalling...
THERE was a strong picket of 80 striking GMB domestic workers, porters and caterers at Ealing Hospital yesterday morning. The workers were in their fourth day of a week-long strike against their employer Medirest. They are demanding a living wage of £8.80 an hour, sick pay and annual leave. Striker Chering Lama...
SAMANTHA Power, the US Permanent Representative to the United Nations, did not waste any time in attacking the Russian veto of the imperialists’ resolution before the UN Security Council declaring the Crimean referendum to be illegal. She revealed to the full the fear that the ruling classes of the...
ANY talk of ‘recovery’ has been well and truly scotched by the revelation that Britain’s trade deficit widened more than expected in January, rising to nearly £10 billion. The Office for National Statistics figures released on Friday, show the goods trade deficit was £9.793 billion ($16.5 billion) in January,...
THE Irish courts have ruled that a four-hour strike action at airports due to take place today is illegal. The SIPTU trade union which was organising the strike action commented yesterday: ‘A Legal injunction has been granted at the High Court in Dublin to the Dublin Airport Authority (DAA). ‘This...