Monthly Archives: September 2014
THE one thing guaranteed by the world economic crisis of the capitalist system, is that all the weakness, greed and corruption of the ruling class emerges into the plain light of day for all to see. The reality of the world crisis is being driven home in Britain through a...
ISRAELI authorities on Sunday morning opened the Kerem Shalom commercial crossing in the southeastern Gaza Strip after it was closed for three days over the Jewish New Year holiday. A spokesperson for the Gaza crossings authority said in a statement that Israel notified the Palestinian side that 380 truckloads of...
DONCASTER care workers have stepped up their fight yesterday, the first day of a further three weeks of strike action in an escalating battle over wages. Roger Hutt, Doncaster Care UK striker, chair of the strike committee and Unison shop steward told News Line: ‘This is the 70th day...
FIERCE local opposition has emerged on the Carpenter’s Estate, in the heart of Stratford’s Olympic Village, where tenants are being forced from their homes, and transported to areas outside London by Newham Labour Council to make way for privateers. Local mum’s and supporters have occupied four of the empty flats...
THE Tory Party Conference opened in a massive crisis in Birmingham yesterday, after two top Tories resigned from their positions in the preceding two days. On Friday, Rochester and Strood Tory MP Mark Reckless appeared on stage at the UKIP conference in Doncaster, saying: ‘Today I am leaving the Conservative...
IN HIS Friday night address to the UN General Assembly in New York, Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas said that a return to direct negotiations was impossible and accused Israel of committing ‘genocide’. He slammed Israel for having ‘predetermined’ the result of the negotiations process so far. Abbas had promised to submit...
CHILDREN who have been in trouble with the law are being put on electronic tags, given curfews and then sent back to prison because of failures in the system meant to support them, a new report claims today (Monday 29 September). Research by the Howard League for Penal Reform shows...
‘WASHINGTON has openly declared its right to use military force unilaterally and wherever it sees fit in order to protect its own interests,’ Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told the UN General Assembly on Saturday. Condemning US air strikes on Syria, he added that the Western alliance, led by the...
THE Tory party was delivered shattering blows on the eve of its conference when Tory MP Mark Reckless stepped out onto the platform of the UKIP conference to announce that he was leaving the party, joining UKIP and forcing another by-election on the coalition. Reckless becomes the second Tory MP...
ON SEPTEMBER 12 at the Farlam Commission into the deaths at Marikana, the families of the 44 people who died were telling their stories. The family presentations were short. Together, they made a compelling narrative of the lives of rock-drill operators — their aspirations, their determination to fight for a living...
ON THE day that MPs were voting on going to war once again in the Middle East, a very senior civil servant made it crystal clear that the war against the working class in Britain is also never-ending and is about to be stepped up. Sir Bob Kerslake, the outgoing...
PARLIAMENT has been recalled from its summer break today especially to vote on whether the UK will join the US-led air strikes against ISIL in Iraq. It seems that currently the Labour Party is opposed to bombing Syria without the agreement of the Syrian government and is saying that the...
GREEK public sector workers staged a one-day national strike last Tuesday against the government’s workers’ ‘evaluation’ schemes which are designed to lead to mass sackings of at least ten per cent of the total workforce, a fact admitted by government officials. The strike was called by the ADEDY (public sector...
TODAY, the House of Commons is to engage in an emergency debate on Britain joining the US bombing campaign in Iraq and Syria. In this debate, Cameron will be demanding that Britain join ‘a long but necessary’ war against Islamic State (IS) jihadists in Iraq. To rally MPs to this imperialist...
INDIRECT talks between Palestinian and Israeli officials will continue in the last week of October, a senior Hamas official said on Tuesday. Izzat al-Rishaq said that talks ended Tuesday and both sides presented their demands to be discussed in the next round of negotiations. The Palestinian delegation demanded a permanent truce...
ALMOST a quarter of a million civil servants will take part in 72 hours of action in the public sector with a strike on Wednesday 15 October, the Public and Commercial Services union announced yesterday. The 24-hour walkout is being co-ordinated with industrial action by unions in the health service...
THE National Executive of the Public and Civil Servants Union (PCS) have called out their members in England on a one-day strike on Wednesday 15th October as part of three days of strikes, with health unions coming out on Monday and local government workers striking the next day. This will...
THE John Smith Institute have produced a series of damaging case studies on the impact of outsourcing on employees’ terms and conditions. Outsourcing leads to: • deterioration in manual workers’ pay following outsourcing; • increase in work intensification; • transferred low-wage workers have fewer bridges to more extended internal labour markets in public-sector...
LABOUR leader Ed Milliband opened his speech to the Labour Party conference yesterday by throwing his full support behind the US-led bombing raids on Syria, supported by five Gulf states. In doing so he signalled to Tory PM Cameron that Labour would give its support to the UK participating in...
YESTERDAY US president Barak Obama finally launched the air and missile strikes he has been threatening inside Syria without the agreement of the Syrian government. These strikes – in gross violation of international law, which plainly states that such actions are tantamount to a declaration of war against a sovereign...
IN yesterday’s speech Labour’s Shadow Chancellor, Ed Balls, committed any future Labour government to savage attacks on all the gains of the welfare state in order to pay off the bankers’ debts. In particular, he singled out the parents of young children for even more austerity cuts when he announced that the next...
SENATOR Warren, and the Koch Sisters led the rally to protect Social Security, and Medicare organised by AFSCME members at the ‘Hands Off’ rally on September 18. Vowing that she and other Democrats ‘will not stand by and let Social Security be cut or allow Medicare to be gutted,’ US...
LABOUR Shadow Home Secretary Ed Balls, yesterday made it crystal clear that if elected, Labour would continue Tory policy to to make pensioners, workers, the unemployed and immigrants pay for the economic crisis. Speaking to the Labour Party Conference in Manchester, Balls claimed the cuts were necessary to ‘balance the...
ADDRESSING the party’s annual conference in Manchester yesterday, Labour leader Miliband pledged to increase the National Minimum Wage to £8 an hour over the course of the next parliament if it wins the general election. At the same time Labour pledged a one per cent cut in business rates, which...
THE content of the ‘devolution campaign’, which has now developed into the ‘Home Rule for England campaign’ was revealed yesterday when Tory Justice Secretary Grayling told the Sunday Telegraph that the constitutional shake-up after the Scottish independence referendum must deliver a new deal for England. English MPs alone must...
PALESTINIAN Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah said on Thursday that no mechanisms had been put in place to ensure the implementation of the reconciliation agreement signed by Hamas, Fatah, and other parties in April. All political parties who signed the agreement are fully responsible for finding solutions to the currently unresolved...
EARLY yesterday morning it was officially declared that the Scottish Nationalists were defeated as Scotland voted to stay in the United Kingdom after the majority of voters rejected independence. With the results in from all 32 council areas, the ‘No’ side won with 2,001,926 votes against 1,617,989 for ‘Yes’;...
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka has spoken about the importance of the struggle of the US trade unions. ‘Today, thousands of workers embraced a union future. The hardworking men and women of American Airlines and US Airways voted for union representation and a legally binding contract. Their collective skill has built...
SCOTTISH workers rejected the narrow reactionary nationalism of the SNP on Thursday because of the fact that they hate both the Scottish and English Tories and despise the Labour leadership which loves capitalism. But the most important lesson for the working class that has come out of this campaign is...
THE El-Khabar newspaper in Algeria has reported on the preparations of imperialist countries to launch a military campaign against Islamist militias in Libya. It states: ‘Algerian President Bouteflika last Friday summoned the members of the Higher National Security Council to an extraordinary meeting on two points: the first was the...
A WOMAN died yesterday in an ambulance while waiting in a queue of around 15 emergency vehicles outside the A&E at Morriston Hospital in Swansea for between 30 and 40 minutes. The Welsh Ambulance Service and Abertawe Bro Morgannwg health board have launched a joint review. They said they wanted...
THE 595 women cleaners of the Greek Finance Ministry, sacked en masse on 17 September 2013 on the direct orders of the EC-IMF-ECB overlords, completed last Wednesday a year of relentless struggle on the streets to get their jobs back. Since last May, they have set up camp outside a...
UNISON’s NHS workers, including nurses, occupational therapists, porters, paramedics, medical secretaries, cooks and healthcare assistants, have voted yes to industrial action in a dispute over pay in England. NHS staff have been denied a pay rise following the Government’s decision to ignore the independent Pay Review Body recommendation. This means...
‘YOU should be ashamed. The situation is absolutely appalling. They’re killing children! You have the area completely under your control and are therefore responsible for that area.’ This is what US Envoy Morris Droper told Ariel Sharon, in September 1982 about the massacre of Sabra and Shatila refugee camps by...
THE US’ top military commander General Dempsey has broken ranks with President Obama by telling the Senate Armed Services Committee that US troops may become involved in ground attacks against the Islamic State, and that he may recommend it, despite the repeated pledges to the contrary from...
UK registered unemployment fell by 146,000 to 2.02 million in the three months to the end of July, official figures show. The figures do not show how many people have been sanctioned off the JobSeeker’s Allowance, but did show that the number of people claiming the JobSeeker’s Allowance in August...
CONSULTATION has begun into the closures of children’s heart surgeries in England after a review last year. There was a huge public outcry against the closure programme of the NHS ‘Safe & Sustainable review’ which forced the government to dismiss the report as ‘flawed’. However, now a public consultation on new...
PALESTINIAN President Mahmoud Abbas will ask his French counterpart Francois Hollande for official recognition of Palestine in an upcoming meeting this week, the Palestinian foreign minister said on Sunday. Riyad al-Maliki said that Abbas is due to meet Hollande in Paris on Friday before arriving in New York. Abbas will urge...
YESTERDAY saw a LibDem, Tory and Labour Party coalition scrambling to promise anything and everything in a desperate effort to save the UK Union on which the past, present and future of British capitalism depends. Cameron, Miliband and Clegg ‘Vowed’ that ‘The people of Scotland want to know that...
IRAN is proud of the fact that the USA opposes its involvement in the coalition against the Islamic State, a senior Iranian MP has declared. Majlis National Security and Foreign Policy Committee spokesman, Seyyed Hoseyn Naqavi-Hoseyni, stated on Sunday: ‘Iran does not need to be a member of American’s coalition...
‘STOP reorganising the NHS, increase NHS funding, and commit to an NHS free at the point of delivery,’ demanded the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) yesterday. The RCP said in a statement on the eve of the party conference season, the government and politicians must stop reorganising the NHS from...
LAST week at the annual conference of the TUC the largest union in the country, Unite, issued a grovelling plea to the Tory led coalition for the government to seek an exemption for the NHS from the free trade agreement being negotiated between the EU and US. This agreement –...
US Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in Turkey last Thursday to seek support for more military action against Islamic State (IS) fighters in Iraq and Syria. This came after Turkey refused to allow the use of its southern air bases to launch attacks on the jihadist group. US President Barack...
FOLLOWING the release of a video showing the killing of hostage David Haines by Islamic State militants, PM Cameron yesterday announced ‘five points’, for dealing with the situation. Cameron said: ‘First, we will work with the Iraqi government to ensure it represents all of its people and is able to...