Monthly Archives: June 2014
AN unprecedented attempt by the government to hold the first ever completely secret criminal trial in the UK has been blocked by the Court of Appeal. The fact that the state and the government intended to hold a trial in secret, that was itself to be a secret, shows...
PAY ‘nosedived’ last month, as the quarterly rate of earnings growth crashed to 0.7% from 1.9% the previous month. The government’s preferred CPI monthly inflation measure currently stands at 1.8%, meaning that wages are collapsing fast. Meanwhile, on the back of growing ‘self-employment’, the government is claiming that unemployment fell 161,000...
LARGE numbers of people have been forced to flee the Iraqi city of Mosul after Islamist militants from the ISIS pro-Al Qaeda group effectively took control of parts of the city. The US-backed Prime Minister Maliki has asked parliament to declare a state of emergency, and has called for assistance...
CAMPAIGNERS fighting to stop Hove Park School in Brighton & Hove being turned into an academy have called a march for July 5th. Hands Off Hove Park School (HOHPS) are a group of parents/carers and other community members who are seriously concerned about plans to seek academy status for the...
Greek armed riot police viciously attacked with their shields a group of protesting sacked women cleaners at the entrance to the Finance Ministry building in Athens on Tuesday afternoon. Cleaners were pushed and kicked by the riot police as they shouted ‘this is a junta, this is a junta!’. Several...
FAR too many young Canadian workers are either unemployed or underemployed and governments must come up with a strategy to solve the problem – a problem that has been with us persistently since the 2008 recession, says Hassan Yussuff, president of the Canadian Labour Congress. ‘Young people want to work...
WHAT stood out like a sore thumb when the emergency question was put to Home Secretary May in the House of Commons, on Monday afternoon, concerning her civil war with Education Secretary Gove, is that she brazenly refused to answer it. Labour Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper stated: ...
STAFF at City College Brighton took one-day strike action yesterday against threatened job losses and cuts to courses and support staff. The UCU members voted by 89 per cent for industrial action against what the union says are management plans to introduce Tesco-style education, McDonald’s-style contracts, vanity projects and empire...
NATIONAL Union of Teachers (NUT) leaders yesterday opposed government plans for unannounced school inspections and taking state schools out of Birmingham City Council’s control into special measures and turning them into academies. Speaking to News Line as NUT representatives prepared to lobby MPs to Stand Up For Education, NUT General...
AT LAST Friday’s annual meeting of T-Mobile US Inc. in Bellevue, Washington, east of Seattle, shareholders voted on a proposal urging the T-Mobile board of directors to disclose how it assesses human rights risks in its operations and supply chain. The human rights shareholder proposal was presented by the Marco...
THE picture showing one-inch-long metal spikes driven into the pavement in the doorway of a block of luxury flats in central London in order to prevent the homeless seeking shelter has created widespread revulsion. These spikes – which appeared two weeks ago outside a luxury development in Southwark Bridge Road...
BENEFIT cuts have created a kind of famine’ one of the over twenty million people who have visited food banks this year said, the Trussell Trust reported yesterday. The Trussell Trust released their new report aptly entitled ‘Below the Breadline’ which criticises the Tory coalition government’s benefit sanctions which...
THE LABOUR opposition let both Tory Education Secretary Michael Gove and Home Secretary Theresa May off the hook by failing to call for their resignations over the ‘Trojan Horse’ scandal following the debate in parliament yesterday. The ‘Trojan Horse’ scandal refers to allegations by May that Gove was responsible for...
‘FREE, Free Palestine!’ shouted a crowd of over 400 workers and youth demonstrating opposite the Israeli embassy on Saturday. The protest was part of the International Global March to Jerusalem against Israel’s ongoing violations against the Palestinians in Jerusalem. ‘In our thousands in our millions, we are all Palestinians,’ the crowd...
EDUCATION Secretary Michael Gove, who has carried forward the privatisation battle against the teaching trade unions, and driven forward the Free School-Academy agenda, has been forced to apologise to the prime minister after a bitter no-holds-barred row with Home Secretary May. This threatened and still threatens to bring...
EDUCATION Secretary Michael Gove is appearing before the House of Commons today to explain his role in the ‘Trojan Horse’ row for which he has already been forced to apologise to prime minister Cameron. The Tory Party has been shaken by the public row that has erupted between Gove and...
‘WHOSE GP surgeries? Our GP surgeries?’ rang out through the streets of east London as over 200 local residents, trade unionists, health workers and campaigners marched on Thursday to stop the closure of their GP surgeries. Cuts to the Minimum Practice Income Guarantee income (MPIG) has meant ...
SOME 1,500 workers marched through the Athens city centre on Thursday evening, in a militant demonstration of solidarity with the nine-month-old fight of the Finance Ministry’s sacked women cleaners. Large delegations of secondary school teachers, school guards, ERT media workers and other public sector workers participated with their banners in...
AN ‘historic gamble’, a giant ‘leap into the unknown’ – these were just two of the headlines that greeted the news that last Thursday the European Central Bank (ECB) has cut its deposit rate below zero. The deposit rate is now -0.1%. What this means is that banks who deposit...
HUGE masses of people took to the streets just after Speaker of the People''s Assembly, Mohammad Jihad al-Laham, announced that Dr. Bashar Hafez al-Assad has won the post of president of The Syrian Arab Republic for a new constitutional term. Demonstrations celebrating the victory were held across the country. Election...
THE President of the crisis-ridden EU Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso yesterday told the BBC that the inclusion of Russia in any future meeting of the leading industrial nations is uncertain. Barroso said the ‘democratic’ G7 club ‘does not accept today the Russia of Vladimir Putin.’ What a grand declaration...
DOCTORS’ leaders, Unison general secretary Dave Prentis and TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady joined paramedics, nurses, midwives and physiotherapists in a protest outside the Department of Health in Whitehall yesterday. Timed to mark the 66th NHS Birthday, the protesters held a giant cheque for £1.5bn unpaid overtime. BMA chair of council,...
OVER 200 patients, health professionals, union members and campaigners marched through east London yesterday against cuts to GP surgeries which threaten the closure of 22 of them and 98 practices nationally. The march started at St Katherine’s Dock practice which is one of those threatened with closure. Marchers shouted ‘Whose GP’s...
THE Palestinian unity government has been sworn in, and has the backing of both the Fatah and Hamas movements. The defiant formation of the national unity government comes after the Israeli regime openly sabotaged the peace talks by making demands that the Palestinian leadership could not agree to, such as...
‘THE very best of America has come from imminent disturbance, and to limit people’s right to assemble and protest is both unacceptable and un-American,’ AFL-CIO Strategic Advisor Communications Director, Eric Hauser insisted on Monday. The AFL-CIO has released a video slamming the North Carolina state legislature for establishing undemocratic ‘imminent...
TODAY, GPs and their supporters will be marching through Tower Hamlets to demand proper funding of GP surgeries, which are threatened with closure due to cuts. It is estimated that 22 GP practices in East London could be bankrupted due to the loss of Minimum Practice Income Guarantee (MPIG) funds...
A SQUAD of Greek armed riot police on Tuesday morning attacked the sacked women cleaners who were blockading the entrance into one of the buildings of the Finance Ministry in central Athens. Riot police used their shields along with punches and kicks to push away the women cleaners and their...
THE ITF (International Transport Workers’ Federation) and IUF (International Union of Food, Agricultural and Hospitality Workers) are demanding the reinstatement of 78 unfairly sacked workers at Philippines seafood supplier Citra Mina – and have promised the workers their continuing support. The 78 are fishers and cannery workers at the...
NATO defence ministers are meeting in Brussels to discuss the ‘long-term security implications’ of Russia’s response to the US-UK-EU inspired coup in Kiev, and the massive movement of workers in the east of the Ukraine, who have refused to recognise the Kiev government. Russia intervened in the Ukraine after the...
The Lugansk city authorities called the Monday airstrike on the city centre, which killed eight, a war crime by the Kiev authorities. In a statement on Tuesday head of the Lugansk People’s Republic’s press service Vladimir Inogorodsky said in a statement: ‘I declare that the air strike on a non-combatant...
YESTERDAY students at Crown Woods School in Eltham were on strike against management’s decision to turn the school into an academy. Students gathered outside the school’s front gate in protest encouraging parents, passers-by and fellow students to join in and sign petitions. The gathering grew to around 50 to 60...
LAST week saw a concerted effort by the Tory-led coalition, aided by their friends in the bourgeois press, to deny that a catastrophic housing bubble has been stoked up by their ‘Help to Buy’ scheme. The basis for the claim that there is no housing bubble rests on data released...
THE Cambodian government should quash the convictions of 25 human rights activists, factory workers, and others for lack of evidence, Human Rights Watch has said. On May 30, 2014, the Phnom Penh municipal court convicted the defendants in three cases of committing violence during recent demonstrations and imposed suspended sentences...
GPs have been told by Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) they will have to hit targets for cutting emergency admission rates. If they do not they will not receive funding worth £5 per patient promised to them to support the care of elderly patients, Pulse magazine has revealed. A...
RUSSIA is seeking peaceful co-existence and ‘compromise’ both with the EU and Ukraine’s new president Petro Poroshenko, President Putin’s supreme economic adviser, Andrey Belusov has revealed. Speaking to German newspaper Die Welt (DW), Belusov admitted he is relying on Poroshenko to be ‘a prudent politician’. The interview was published last Tuesday...
THE German magazine Der Spiegel says British PM David Cameron warned EU leaders that the UK could leave the EU if Luxembourg’s ex-PM Jean-Claude Juncker became president of the European Commission. It reported Cameron as saying that the appointment could destabilise his government, which may bring forward referendum plans on...