Monthly Archives: October 2014
NUMSA National Executive Committee has issued a full statement on COSATU in response to calls for its expulsion from the federation. The National Union of Metalworkers SA (NUMSA) hit back at its potential expulsion from COSATU accusing the federation of betraying its roots and defended its decision to organise in...
THE FBU is escalating its strike action tonight with four days of action in England beginning at 6pm in the sharpening fight over pensions. The strike continues until 6pm on 4 November. The FBU says that this round of strike action follows a refusal from the Department for Communities and Local...
THE US Federal Reserve has announced it is ending its quantitative easing (QE) stimulus programme begun in 2008. The six years since the banking collapse of 2008 saw the US government rescuing General Motors with a temporary nationalisation and reorganisation programme, and the Federal Reserve Bank handing $3.8 trillion in...
BECTU members at the Ritzy cinema will ballot for strike action over management’s decision to announce large scale redundancies just six weeks after an agreement was reached to settle the long-running pay dispute. Members at the Ritzy cinema in Brixton are to vote on strike action against the job cuts...
THE US Secretary of State John Kerry has warned Russia that it must not recognise the elections that are due to take place this Sunday in the ‘People’s Republics’ that have been established in Eastern Ukraine, or their outcome. Kerry says that Russia will be breaking international agreements if it...
THE number of UK children living in poverty has increased to more than a quarter as a result of austerity measures introduced following the 2008 recession, Unicef has said in a report released on Tuesday. The ‘Children of the Recession’ report showed that 2.6 million children were living in...
‘WHITEWASH!’, said the furious parents of extremely sick children yesterday, as they branded a long overdue report into the decision to suspend children’s heart surgery in Leeds. The report shows that the decision to suspend the vital services at Leeds was based on ‘invalidated and incomplete data’. Operations at the...
‘THE ANC/SACP (African National Congress/South African Communist Party) is trying to weaken, isolate and destroy us,’ NUMSA KZN (National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa Kwazulu-Natal) Regional Political Workshop said on Sunday. The region issued a declaration describing the ANC ‘task team’ intervention, led by deputy president of both South...
MICHAEL Fallon, Tory defence secretary, did an Enoch Powell (he made his anti-immigrant ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968) when he claimed on Sunday that British towns are being ‘swamped’ by immigrants and their residents are ‘under siege’. After the ensuing outcry he was urged to admit that his...
THE European Central Bank (ECB) published the results of its latest stress tests carried out on 123 European banks on Sunday, results which showed that, even according to central banks own dubious criteria, 24 of them didn’t have enough capital to survive another economic crisis. The ECB by its own...
THIRTY Palestinian youths were wounded by rubber-coated bullets during clashes with Israeli forces in the East Jerusalem village of Al-Isawiyah last Friday. The wounded received medical treatment in the field. In the course of the clashes, the Israeli forces fired tear-gas grenades at residential houses in the village, setting...
‘WHO are the killers? Police are the killers! IPCC, not fit for purpose! Scrap the IPCC!’ shouted workers and youth at a rally opposite Downing Street on Saturday. They were gathered at the end of a 1,500-strong United Families and Friends Campaign (UFFC) procession from Trafalgar Square. UFFC founder member Minkah...
PUTIN posed the question at last week’s International Discussion Club in Sochi: ‘The World Order: New Rules or a Game without rules’. (see feature) He was unable to supply an answer, since he is essentially hoping for a change of heart by the western imperialist powers, who are now being...
MOSCOW – Vladimir Putin took part in the final plenary meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club’s XI session on ‘The World Order: New Rules or a Game without Rules’ held at Sochi. Putin said: ‘The world is full of contradictions today. We need to be frank in asking each...
EMERGENCY admissions to accident and emergency departments have hit their highest level since records began, the latest NHS England figures reveal. This is just as the government is planning even more A&E and Maternity department’s closures. Official figures for last week’s performance show that demand on emergency departments across the country...
MORE than 220 firefighters’ jobs in north Wales are threatened with being axed if £3.3m is not found over the next five years, the North Wales Fire and Rescue Authority warned yesterday. The fire and rescue authority says that it will axe 228 jobs, close seven fire stations or remove...
THE crisis of the European Union’s attempts to overcome the contradictions of European capitalism has landed the Tory Party into the gravest crisis of its history. In an attempt to prevent more defections to UKIP and avoid a humiliating defeat in the forthcoming Rochester and Strood by-election which could cost...
HUNDREDS of labour activists, farmworkers and their allies marched on Los Angeles City Hall on Wednesday demanding that a Fresno fruit grower recognise a union contract. This was the latest turn in a long-standing dispute over whether the United Farm Workers should represent the company’s employees. Calling for a big...
THE new NHS report released yesterday has revealed a further £30bn of NHS cuts by 2020. The report entitled the ‘Five Year Forward View’ states that a £30bn shortfall in the NHS has to be addressed with a new round of ‘drastic changes to services’. The drastic changes proposed include...
THIS IS the text of a speech by SIPTU President, Jack O’Connor, at the centenary commemoration of the founding of the Irish Neutrality League released on 21 October 2014. ‘I want to compliment the Peace and Neutrality Alliance for its initiative in launching two publications and arranging this meeting to...
A FIVE-YEAR plan for the NHS – produced by NHS England, Public Health England, the regulator Monitor, the NHS Trust Development Authority, Care Quality Commission and Health Education England – supported by the coalition government, has highlighted that there will be a £30bn NHS deficit by 2020. he report concedes...
FURIOUS over the Philadelphia School Reform Commission’s (SRC) move to unilaterally cancel its teachers’ contract, 3,000 people shut down North Broad Street last Thursday, vowing more disruptive action if the panel’s action is not undone. The eyes of the nation are on Philadelphia, said American Federation of Teachers president Randi...
NEO-fascist movements in Ukraine are operating with the connivance of the Kiev authorities, which is absolutely unacceptable, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Monday. ‘With the connivance of the authorities, these thugs are marching under the neo-Nazi and even Nazi slogans and banners and promote an ideology that has...
200 RESIDENTS and their supporters took part in an all-day picket and protest at West Hendon housing estate in north west London yesterday, where Barnet Council is demolishing the estate and evicting tenants and leaseholders. Building giant Barratts has been handed the contract and protesters were stopping their trucks entering...
DOCTORS have condemned a ‘bounty’ scheme launched by NHS England at the beginning of this month under which GPs receive a payment of £55 for every patient they diagnose as suffering from dementia. GPs yesterday described the scheme as ‘a completely new and unethical departure’ which has crossed ‘a red...
THE Israeli military offensive on the Gaza Strip during July and August 2014 claimed the lives of 501 Palestinian children. Defence for Children International – Palestine (DFI-Palestine) is calling for support for a UN inquiry into the Israeli slaughter constituting a war crime. DFI-Palestine says: ‘Children were killed in their homes...
PRESIDENT Mahmoud Abbas has pledged that he will submit a resolution to the UN Security Council to make a decision that the Israeli occupation of the West Bank must end within three years. If the US vetoes the resolution as expected, PNA officials have said Abbas will give the green...
TENANTS and leaseholders are protesting in Tyrrel Way, West Hendon, north London from 7am today, against the eviction threat to 250 families from the West Hendon Estate. The ‘Our West Hendon’ campaign says: ‘Barnet Council, Barratts and Metropolitan Housing have betrayed our trust and are determined...
‘THE UK’s health services are hopelessly underfunded in terms of resources and staff who are trained to deal with new mothers with mental health issues,’ Lee Wright, Senior Lecturer in Midwifery and Women’s Health at Birmingham City University, said yesterday. He was responding to a report produced by the London...
RADIOGRAPHERS across the UK were on strike yesterday for the first time in more than 30 years in an escalating struggle over the Tory government’s refusal to give them a pay rise. The strike, from 9am until 1pm was solid, with picket lines at hospitals in England, Wales, Scotland and...
THE most powerful capitalist economy in the world is now living on a veritable knife edge, liable at any moment to crash spectacularly, bringing down the banks and economies of the rest of the world. The precarious nature of US capitalism was amply demonstrated last week when on Wednesday, supposedly...
THE 150,000 workers who turned out in London on Saturday, as well as the thousands in Glasgow and Belfast, represent a massive change in the workers’ movement in the UK. There is now emerging a mass movement of millions who are refusing to take another step backwards in the...
150,000 WORKERS, trade unionists, students and youth marched from Embankment to Hyde Park in central London on the TUC’s ‘Britain Needs a Pay Rise’ march on Saturday afternoon. Marchers carried thousands of balloons, banners, placards and flags from Unison, Unite, GMB, PCS, RCN, RCM, USDAW, Equity, RMT, NUT, NASUWT and...
THOUSANDS of European citizens took to the streets in dozens of European cities on October 11 to show their rejection of the proposed trade deals between the European Union and Canada (CETA) and the EU and the US (TTIP). Global union federation IUF said: ‘In Austria, the national centre...
HUNDREDS of thousands of public sector workers from across the UK, joining the TUC demonstration through central London today, are furious that while rent, bills and food are spiralling, their pay is at poverty levels. Working families are being driven to food banks to survive and many are forced to...
TODAY, hundreds of thousands of workers and young people will take to the streets of London, Glasgow and Belfast in mass demonstrations called by the TUC under the banner of ‘Britain Needs a Pay Rise’. Exactly two years ago half a million marched under the TUC slogan ‘A Future That...
A SYRIAN Electricity Ministry official said on Thursday that a worker was killed and four others were injured in an explosion of a landmine left behind by terrorists in Adra city in Damascus Countryside that is home to residential compounds for workers. The official said that the workers were doing...
CURRENTLY the Ukrainian parliament is under siege by fascist bands led by the Svoboda and Right Sector movements demanding that MPs pass a law recognising the Bandera group that fought alongside Hitler’s forces in World War 2. Meanwhile, the east of the country is under the control of the self-defence forces who have...
TENS of thousands of civil servants and allied workers expressed their anger at poverty pay, attacks on their pensions and privatisation during Wednesday’s solid 24-hour strike called by the Public and Commercial Services union (PCS). PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka told News Line at a London photocall opposite parliament: ‘It’s...
‘IF YOU want to talk about waste in the NHS, then stop outsourcing midwives and nurses to agency staff,’ Royal College of Midwives (RCM) director of policy Jon Skews said yesterday in response to the Tory health secretary Jeremy Hunt’s latest attack on NHS staff. Doctors’ union BMA, nurses’...
AS panic gripped investors on the world’s stock markets, it emerged yesterday that Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway investment company has sold more than 245 million shares in supermarket giant Tesco. The sale takes Berkshire’s holding to below 3%. Earlier this month, Buffett said his decision to invest in Tesco had...
PALESTINIAN Prime Minister Rami al-Hamdallah has expressed the hope that the world’s countries will feel responsibility towards the Gaza Strip, and asked them to work for ending the Israeli occupation and not just solving the problem of Gaza. They should also intensify the efforts to establish a Palestinian state whose...