Monthly Archives: May 2014
PART TWO THE National Union of Metalworkers South Africa’s (NUMSA) response to an attack by Jeremy Cronin of the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) is concluded today. It was written by Karl Cloete, NUMSA’s Deputy General Secretary and reflects the growing struggle for a revolutionary socialist movement there: Comrade Cronin obviously...
SIMON Stevens, the Chief Executive of NHS England, has announced his plan for closing major District General Hospitals in England and replacing them with small local private community hospitals linked to networks of GPs. Stevens said that he wanted more elderly patients cared for ‘in the community’ in...
SIMON Stevens the new Chief Executive of NHS England is no stranger to the NHS and the struggle to privatise it. He was chief adviser to two health secretaries under a Labour government, Frank Dobson and Alan Milburn, from 1997 to 2001, pioneering the beginning of the health market...
PART ONE THE National Union of Metalworkers South Africa, Numsa, has released a full statement responding to Jeremy Cronin, of the South African Communist Party (SACP). Cronin attacked NUMSA general secretary Irvin Jim’s leadership in an article entitled ‘Irvin Gymnastics – the devious art of political contortionism’. NUMSA brands the SACP attack...
RUSSIA, Belarus and Kazakhstan have just signed the historic Eurasian Economic Union. It comes into effect in January 2015, and will get rid of trade barriers, and see a completely free movement of its 200 million people. Armenia will join the union on June 15, Kyrgyzstan plans to join by...
SELF-DEFENCE forces in eastern Ukraine have shot down two military helicopters near the city of Slavyansk. One was carrying fourteen soldiers including an army general. This happened as self-defence fighters and forces that support the right-wing Kiev coup continued fierce battles in the east of the country. The coupist...
THE BMA’s conference of Local Medical Committees on the 22/23rd May 2014 exposed a huge crisis in UK general practice. This came out in the passionate speech of the new chairman of the BMA’s General Practitioners Committee (GPC) Dr Chaand Nagpaul. He movingly described the impossible situation that GPs find...
STOP The War yesterday condemned the government for blocking a petition submitted to its e-petitions website which called for an end to NATO exercises in the Ukraine. A group of politicians, celebrities and campaigners submitted the petition on 7th May to highlight the participation of UK and US troops on...
ON Tuesday the world’s major investors, plus celebrities such as ex-President Clinton, confirmed admirers, and even relics of feudal society such as Prince Charles, met at an exclusive ‘Inclusive Capitalism Initiative’, from which of course the working class was barred! The source of the meeting was the banking and industrial...
FOLLOWING the illegal Ukrainian presidential election – called to try and legitimise the imperialist-inspired coup – the billionaire, Petro Poroshenko, wasted no time in ordering all-out war to smash the anti-coup forces in eastern Ukraine. On Monday, fighter jets and helicopters pounded Donetsk airport and the surrounding area killing an...
FOLLOWING her arrest last Wednesday at the McDonald’s shareholders’ meeting outside of Chicago, Mary Kay Henry, President of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), issued the following statement: ‘Earlier today, I was arrested outside of McDonald’s world headquarters alongside more than 100 McDonald’s workers from across the country because we...
OVER 100 have been killed, including 50 members of local self-defence forces and just over the same number of civilians, in clashes with pro-Kiev troops which started on Monday in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk, the prime minister of the Donetsk People’s Republic said yesterday. However, while the self-defence...
THE Tory education minister, Michael Gove, has advanced his plan to rid the GCSE English exam of classic books and plays he considers to be ‘not English’ enough for pupils. This became apparent last week when one of the largest examining boards in the country, OCR, released details of the...
ON Saturday, President Bashar al-Assad received a Russian governmental delegation headed by Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, Head of the Russian side to the Joint Committee of the Syrian-Russian trade, economic, scientific and technical cooperation. Talks during the meeting dealt with bilateral relations between Syria and Russia and the importance...
COUNCIL tax debt is the fastest-growing form of debt, Citizens Advice reported yesterday, revealing that it has now become the number one debt problem poor families are facing. One in five people reporting debt problems to Citizens Advice has a council tax arrears issue, said the charity. Since the national Council...
LAST Thursday and Friday, angry workers and youth once again took to the streets of Istanbul to condemn Erdogan’s government, resulting in violent clashes with riot police that left two people dead. Disturbances on Thursday began when a group of some 10 to 15 people began chanting slogans about a...
THERE were big demonstrations in Donetsk and other eastern Ukrainian cities yesterday in opposition to the presidential election that was called by the unelected coupist regime. All five million ballots printed for use in the Donetsk and Lugansk Regions for presidential elections have been stolen, revealed Zhanna Usenko-Chernaya, deputy head...
AT the St Petersburg Economic Forum, President Putin has revealed the basis for both his domestic and foreign policies. It is to seek to live and let live with world capitalism and the imperialist powers. At the Forum he spoke to the assembled magnates of capital about the crisis in...
THE sacked cleaners of the Greek Finance Ministry are continuing the occupation of a ministry building in central Athens since Thursday morning. They have barricade themselves inside the building while outside dozens of other cleaners are on guard along with hundreds of workers, trade unionist and youth who have come...
THE Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) says the failure of academy chains requires the government to consider taking schools back into local authority control to prevent children’s education being disrupted. Following the sudden news of the folding of Prospects Academies Trust (PAT) – which runs six academies – ATL...
AS the results of Thursday’s local council elections come in and are poured over by the main political parties and the pundits in the bourgeois press, a near unanimous agreement has been reached – stunning upset caused by UKIP, collapse of LibDem vote, disaster for Tories and huge blow...
THE crisis in primary care was the topic of an open microphone discussion at the LMC GPs conference in York yesterday morning. Speaker after speaker outlined the drastic shortage of GPs, the extended working day, the massive burden of paperwork, all causing workload burn out, early retirement and emigration. Dr...
SOUTH AFRICAN engineering union Numsa is calling for the building of a new ‘United Front’ to fight for socialism in a strongly worded statement on the revolutionary struggle currently on going in the country: ‘It has become necessary, and quite urgent, to emphatically re-state and explain the December 2013 historic...
GPs FROM across the UK yesterday resoundingly rejected calls to introduce a charge for access to general practice. The proposal was debated and voted on at the Local Medical Committee (LMC) conference in York. During the debate, GPs expressed concern about the extreme funding pressures facing general practice, but agreed...
OPENING the BMA GPs Conference in York, Doctor Nagpaul correctly pointed out that ‘Today, nearly a million patients will visit their GP surgery, that’s 16 times more than those who’ll attend Accident and Emergency units. UK general practice is truly the lifeblood of the NHS, its foundation and that...
A SENIOR Palestinian official has accused Israel of the ‘deliberate execution’ of two Palestinian teenagers shot dead by border policemen in a clash in the West Bank last week. PLO leader Hanan Ashrawi in a statement said: ‘In the strongest possible terms, we condemn the deliberate execution of two Palestinian...
PRINCE Charles’s comparison of President Putin with Hitler, and Putin’s actions in the Ukraine as comparable with Hitler’s treatment of the peoples of Poland and Czechoslovakia, is not just offensive, but proves that the future Charles 111 is made of the same stuff as Charles I. He believed in...
THE conference of General Practitioners organised by the British Medical Association ( BMA) takes place this year at York today and tomorrow, 22nd and 23rd of May. It is called ‘LMC (Local Medical Committee) Conference 2014 – General Practice facing the future.’ This annual conference always takes place a month before the...
THE drive by General Khalifa Haftat to overthrow the remnants of the Libyan government, and take on and defeat the Al-Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood Islamists, is a bid to impose a military dictatorship on Libya for the benefit of US imperialism. Haftat took part in the 1968 Libyan revolution that...
TALLY Weijl, the Swiss clothing giant, has signed the Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety, piling further pressure on supermarkets Migros and Coop to prove their commitment to safety in the Bangladeshi garment sector. The company signed the agreement, drafted by Swiss-based IndustriALL Global Union and UNI Global Union,...
INFLATION has risen to 1.8% for the first time in 10 months further cutting the value of wages, as transport prices soared over March and April. The Office of National Statistics (ONS) reported that air fares and sea fares were the two largest contributors to the Consumer Price Index (CPI)...
IT was reported yesterday that a survey of the top professional ‘money managers’ revealed that these investment experts believe that the world’s leading stock markets are overvalued and heading for a crash. While some bourgeois economists have been voicing their worries for some time that the world stock markets, having...
ALMOST half of UK stock market investors fear that markets are seriously overheating, raising fears that a major world wide economic crash is imminent, a survey revealed yesterday. CFA Society, a ‘money managing’ organisation surveyed 530 stock market experts and found that 49% of them feared that stocks were ‘overvalued’,...
THE National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) says it’s considering forming a new independent labour federation. But only as a last resort. NUMSA says there is growing concern over a ‘dysfunctional alliance’ among its members. The African National Congress (ANC) established a task team to sort out divisions...
BRITAIN’S richest people have never been richer having cornered £520bn between them, says the Sunday Times Rich List. The 26th annual Sunday Times Rich List profiles the 1,000 richest individuals, virtually the whole of the ruling class. There has been a ‘phenomenal’ rise in personal fortunes, by as much as...
BANK of England governor Mark Carney yesterday gave his strongest warning yet about the dangers to the UK’s capitalist economy posed by a collapse of the housing market. Carney said the market represented the ‘biggest risk’ to financial stability and any long-term recovery, adding there were deep structural problems which...
UP to six hundred Care UK workers and their supporters got fantastic support as they marched round Doncaster on Saturday afternoon. The workers have been striking against huge attacks on their pay and conditions which the privateer, a subsidiary of private equity group Bridgepoint Capital, is trying impose. There was a...
ENFIELD residents’ anger over further cuts at Chase Farm Hospital being kept secret are rightly justified, as Trust board letters reveal management plans to ‘dissolve’ the Trust on July 1st. That is the date of ‘the transfer of all services, assets and liabilities’ of Barnet and Chase Farm Hospitals NHS...
UNISON members working for Care UK are marching through Doncaster today at 2pm after 30 days of strike action against Bridgepoint Capital, the private equity investor that bought the company in 2010. Care UK was handed a contract by Doncaster Council in 2013 to take over care of vulnerable people...
THIS week the chairman of the influential Public Administration Committee urged ministers to ‘sort out’ the delay in publishing the official inquiry into the British backed invasion of Iraq (the Chilcot inquiry) which was produced in 2009 and still hasn’t been made public. Despite all the public protestation that...
THE NHS prescription charge is ‘iniquitous’ and ‘outdated’ and should be scrapped, urge GPs in the Drug and Therapeutics Bulletin (DTB), edited by Dr John Cook. ‘The GPs state: ‘Prescription charges are clearly outdated and iniquitous, and we believe it is time that politicians showed their commitment...
RELATIVES of around 150 miners, missing after the deadly mine explosion at the privatised Soma mine in western Turkey, are maintaining a permanent vigil at the site of the disaster. They are refusing to move, while the whole of the Turkish labour movement took strike action yesterday after Prime Minister...
‘NATIONAL Express needs to step up to the plate and take responsibility for the activities being perpetrated in its name in America,’ Teamsters’ General President Jim Hoffa said in response to a Teamters report on one of the company’s subsidiaries in North Carolina. Later on Wednesday, Jim Hoffa, and Unite...
THE number of people estimated to be out of work in the UK fell by 133,000 to a ‘five-year low’ of 2.2 million in the three months to March, official figures indicate. The figure was boosted by a massive growth in ‘self-employment’ of all sorts, and also part-time working...
‘The Abbott Government’s assault on welfare, Medicare, education and the public sector represents the end of the fair go and the biggest attack on the social wage this country has ever seen,’ the ACTU (Australian Congress of Trades Unions) President Ged Kearney said on Tuesday. Responding to Prime Minister Tony...