Monthly Archives: May 2014
TEAMSTERS Union leader James Hoffa stood side by side with the UK’s Unite trade union in Birmingham yesterday mid-day against National Express, the company that tolerates trade unions in the UK but is fighting furiously against them in the USA. Hoffa was in Birmingham for a joint lobby...
LOCAL services including leisure facilities, children’s centres and pothole repairs will be slashed due to funding cuts over the next two years, a survey of councils’ financial strategies suggests. Following £10 billion worth of cuts in the past three years many councils are reaching ‘the end of the road’ for...
MORE WOMEN and babies will die during childbirth if they are told to give birth at home or in ‘midwife-led birth-ing units’ as opposed to traditional maternity wards, health workers have warned. Health workers and patients are outraged at the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence’s (NICE) guidelines that...
THE UK government should set up an inquiry into ‘lessons learned’ after troops withdraw from Afghanistan at the end of this year, the MPs House of Commons Defence Committee has recommended. It said ministers should plan for a ‘thorough’ study covering the aims of the war and whether efforts had...
LIBRARIES, children’s centres, leisure centres and other vital services such as refuse collection and road maintenance will be axed as a result of funding cuts over the next two years, the Local Government Association (LGA) warned yesterday. become increasingly visible over the next two years as councils tackle a...
CAMPAIGNING began on Sunday for Syria’s June 3 presidential election expected to return Bashar al-Assad to power, as the regime marked a victory with the exit of ‘rebels’ from Homs. In Damascus, campaign posters lauding Assad hung on shopping streets and in public gardens, in the run-up...
THE News Line salutes the bravery and heroism of the Ukrainian working class who defied all the threats, intimidation and murderous attacks by forces sent by the illegal Kiev junta to prevent Sunday’s referendums in the eastern regions of Donetsk and Lugansk – which resulted in a massive vote...
TWO-HUNDRED workers, trade unionists, students and youth attended the News Line-All Trades Unions Alliance (ATUA) Conference at Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, in Holborn, Central London on Saturday and voted unanimously for the Main Resolution (printed at end of article). A powerful delegation of Care UK Strikers from Doncaster got...
THE next Tory government will introduce a threshold on union ballots for strike action. PM Cameron has said: ‘I want a Conservative government to pass new legislation so that strikes in central public services can’t go ahead unless there is a proper threshold crossed in terms of the number...
THE referendum in Ukraine’s Donetsk and Lugansk regions, seeking independence from the central government was massively supported yesterday. THE referendum in Ukraine’s Donetsk and Lugansk regions, seeking independence from the central government was massively supported yesterday. Local self-defence forces provided security. ‘Turnout at the referendum is exceptionally high,’ the...
THE Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition is cracking up, with the latest row breaking out over free schools and school places funding in England, with allies of LibDem Deputy PM Clegg accusing Tory Education Secretary Gove of ‘lunacy’. LibDem officials say 30,000 local authority places are being lost as money is diverted...
A SURVEY by the polling company Ipsos MORI has revealed that the NHS is more popular amongst workers and the middle classes than those pillars of the established order, the armed forces and the royal family, with four out of five people in the country opposed to...
AS RUSSIA celebrated Victory Day over the Nazis with massive parades all over the country, Ukrainian troops using heavy weaponry and tanks in the eastern city of Mariupol killed more than twenty with many wounded. Victory day celebrations were cancelled in Kiev and in many parts of western Ukraine, out...
2.5 MILLION children are living in families struggling with ‘problem debt’, said a shocking new report released yesterday. The report, aptly entitled ‘The Dept Trap’, was produced by The Children’s Society and StepChange debt charity. They say that many families are in an ‘extremely precarious’ position and taking out loans...
PRESIDENT Putin on Wednesday urged Ukrainian workers to postpone their referenda on self-determination. He said: ‘We are calling on representatives of regions in southeastern Ukraine, supporters of federalisation in the country, to postpone the referendum set for May 11 in order to create all the necessary conditions for ...
‘THERE still needs to be a full public inquiry into blacklisting and the activities of major construction employers who still to this day restrict trade union activities in major construction sites, leading to poor practices, health and safety risks and increased fatalities.’ This was the conclusion of Unite Assistant General...
THE OECD has in effect, accused the Bank of England and the Coalition government of blindly organising another banking disaster, under the cover of its ‘help to buy scheme’, which has encouraged people, many of whom are already deep in debt, to take up mortgage deals that require just...
SOME 300 members of the Athens Ukrainian community, including relatives of the Greek-Pontus minorities in the Ukraine and the Crimea, along with contingents of Greek left-wing political parties, staged a militant demonstration at the European Union Offices in central Athens on Tuesday evening. They were protesting against the EE’s support...
UNEMPLOYED workers are to be thrown off benefits if they refuse to go on slave labour zero-hours contracts, the government announced yesterday. Employment Minister Esther McVey outlined the change in a letter to Labour MP Sheila Gilmore, in which she wrote that under the new system JobCentre ‘coaches’ would be...
‘JOBSEEKERS’ will lose their benefits, or their Universal Credit when it is introduced, if they turn down zero-hours contracts, the government has said. This new regime is now to go ahead, despite assurances from ministers in parliament that this would not be the case. This change is taking place because...
While reflecting on a long year of labour struggles at UCSC (University of California Santa Cruz), students looking to the future continued to call for the resignation of UC president Janet Napolitano at their May Day rally last Thursday. The opposition of Napolitano is central to their fight for...
US President, Barak Obama, returned last week from a tour of Asian countries designed to put military flesh on US imperialism’s ‘Asian Pivot’. This military pivot towards the Pacific region was first outlined by Obama back in 2012 and consists of the US pouring more troops and military hardware into...
PRESIDENT Putin’s press spokesman Dmitriy Peskov told journalists on Saturday that Moscow was getting thousands of calls from people in Ukraine’s southeast: ‘People are calling in despair, asking for help, most of them demand Russia’s assistance. All these calls are reported to Vladimir Putin.’ Peskov added: ‘President Putin, Russia...
FIREFIGHTERS were on strike again yesterday between 10am and 3pm over government attacks on their pensions, while Tube workers are due to strike for three days from 9pm tonight in defence of jobs and ticket offices. It was the third consecutive day of FBU strike action after strikes between noon...
THE UK-US-EU backed counter-revolution is now in full swing in eastern Ukraine, where no deed is too foul for their stormtroopers of the Right Sector. The highest casualty toll so far is reported in the city of Odessa where 46 people died in the Trade Unions House massacre...
In a landmark judgment on Friday in the High Court in London, the UK’s detention policy in Afghanistan was declared unlawful. Since November 2009, the UK’s policy has involved internment for the purposes of interrogation for weeks or months beyond the permitted 96 hours under International Security Assistance Force (ISAF)...
10,000 WORKERS, trade unionists and youth were on the London May Day March on Thursday from Clerkenwell Green to Trafalgar Square. The march was led by the RMT Fishburn Band, which was followed by thousands of RMT members carrying flags and wearing t-shirts picturing Bob Crow, the union’s late general...
FIREFIGHTERS taking strike action this weekend are angry that a leaked letter reveals that the government consciously provoked the action rather than negotiate new proposals. Fire Minister Brandon Lewis has alternative pension proposals ready but failed to provide them to the Fire Brigades Union, the letter reveals. His letter...
SIR Jon Cunliffe, Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, is a very worried man – with good reason. What is keeping him awake at night is an unfolding banking crash that is dwarfing that of 2008 and which will drive British capitalism into the abyss. Cunliffe’s latest warning...
MORE than 20,000 trade unionists, workers and youth marched from Clerkenwell Green to Trafalgar Square on London’s May Day yesterday. The march was led by the RMT Fishburn Band which played all the way along the route. This was immediatley followed by scores of RMT union banners led by RMT...
THE working class is being left with no alternative by the government than to take general strike action to prevent all of its gains being wiped out. The King’s Fund stated yesterday that it had marked down years 2015-16 as the ‘period of the cliff edge’, when the deadly situation...
NEW figures released on Wednesday show that at least 1.4 million workers in Britain are enduring the modern day form of slave labour exploitation known as ‘zero-hours contracts’. Figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show a marked increase on estimates last year that ranged from between 250,000 and...
MIN MAQBUL, secretary of the Fatah Revolutionary Council, revealed Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas’s intention to visit the Gaza Strip this week in preparation for national and presidential elections and for the formation of a new national unity government. In his statement on 28 April, Maqbul said: ‘Gaza Strip is an...
THE News Line Editorial Board sends its May Day greetings to the working people of the world at a time when the world capitalist crisis is deepening and is everywhere driving forward the world socialist revolution. The current crisis of capitalism is its deepest ever and the workers of the...