Monthly Archives: December 2014
PATIENTS are suffering as pressure on the NHS reaches a historic high, the BMA warned yesterday. Tthe publication of NHS England’s ‘winter health check’ shows record numbers of patients waiting longer for treatment in emergency departments, and emergency admissions at the highest they''ve been since records began over a...
YESTERDAY official statistics for France show that core inflation had actually fallen into negative figures, - 0.2%, for the first time in recorded history as manufacturers cut prices to the bone in order to keep selling their produce. France, the Eurozone’s second largest economy, is not alone with prices on...
THE Palestinian Mission to the UK yesterday urged the UK government to protect the Palestinian people following the killing of Palestinian leader Abu Ein. In a statement, the mission said: ‘The Palestinian Mission to the UK deplores the extrajudicial killing of Minister Ziad Abu Ein by the Israeli Occupation...
PARTY leader Ed Miliband yesterday set out how a Labour government would ‘deal with the deficit’. In a speech delivered at the New Economic Foundation think-tank in central London, Miliband proceeded ‘to lay out the five principles which underpin my approach’. He said: ‘Our first principle is that we will set...
LABOUR leader Miliband’s speech of yesterday was a pre-election attempt to bolster up support from workers by arguing that Labour will be able to balance the books of bankrupt British capitalism, with more cuts every year, and at the same time deliver more jobs and higher wages...
SYRIAN Deputy Prime Minister, Foreign and Expatriates Minister Walid al-Mu’allim discussed with Speaker of the Iranian Shura Council Ali Larijani bilateral relations between Syria and Iran and the necessity for continuing support to Syria against the global conspiracy to which it is exposed. During the meeting, al-Mu’allim briefed Larijani on...
THE REPORT by the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) very belatedly exposes the CIA torture regime that was imposed after the 2001 Twin Towers attack. The attack was greeted by Bush as a signal to attack Afghanistan and then Iraq, the former for hosting Osama bin Laden, and...
OVER 2,000 striking firefighters marched through Aylesbury on Tuesday chanting ‘Reinstate Ricky Matthews!’ The national demonstration took place during the Fire Brigades Union’s (FBU) national 24-hour strike in England over the Tory-led coalition’s attack on firefighters’ pensions. The march through Aylesbury was in response to National Executive Committee member for FBU...
MIGRANT domestic workers lobbied Parliament yesterday, World Human Rights Day, demanding an end to modern slavery. Workers were joined at the lobby by supporters including Labour MP David Hanson and Unite assistant general secretary Diana Holland. A life-size message board held personal stories highlighting workplace abuse. The campaign is calling for the...
‘REINSTATE Ricky Matthews!’ demanded 2,000 firefighters on a national FBU demonstration in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, yesterday. The march took place as firefighters throughout England took 24-hour strike action in defence of their pensions. It set off from Oakfield Park and passed the main Aylesbury fire station, on its way to a rally...
A THIRD of NHS contracts have been awarded to private sector providers since the Health and Social Care Act came into force, finds an investigation by The BMJ today (Wednesday 10 December). The analysis of 3,494 contracts awarded by 182 Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) in England between April 2013 and...
THE world crisis of capitalism has sharpened to the extent that even the staid Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has been forced to express its alarm that the international banking system is on the brink of a collapse that will dwarf the one in 2008. In its recent Quarterly Review...
A PALESTINIAN man on Sunday succumbed to wounds he sustained in a car attack on a light rail station in East Jerusalem, his wife revealed. Abd al-Karim Nafith Hamid, 60, was injured when a Palestinian slammed his car into the Sheikh Jarrah tram station, killing a Druze officer in the...
IN its direst warning to date on the scale of personal debt, the Bank of England has predicted that half a million families will fall into mortgage arrears and face home repossession once interest rates begin to rise. Since 2009 the Bank has held interest rates at the ridiculously low...
A HIGH Court Judge in London ruled yesterday that the government’s decision to close the Independent Living Fund (ILF) is lawful. The Tories plan to scrap the ILF, which provides support for 18,000 disabled people and is worth £320m a year, on 30th June 2015. Delivering her ruling yesterday, Mrs Justice...
‘SYRIA won’t be a puppet state for the West,’ President Bashar al-Assad has said in an interview with ‘Paris Match’ Magazine. The interviewer began by asking President Assad if he felt responsible for the conflict in his country. He replied: ‘We cannot say that we regret fighting terrorism since the...
SIR Peter Fahy, Greater Manchester Chief Constable and vice-chair of the National Counter-Terrorism Committee, has warned that the fight against ‘extremism’ is leading to a ‘drift towards a police state’ in Britain. In a press interview, Fahy expressed his fears that the police were being turned into ‘thought police’, being...
THE UK military is returning ‘East of Suez’ to its former naval base in Bahrain, 40 years after withdrawal of every military garrison. ‘This new base is a permanent expansion of the Royal Navy’s footprint and will enable Britain to send more and larger ships to reinforce stability in the...
ARMED riot police unleashed a pre-planned pogrom of sheer violence against mass marches of mainly school and university students in all the main cities of Greece on Saturday. The rallies and marches attracted tens of thousands on the 6th anniversary of the killing by a policeman of 15-years-old school student...
FAST-food workers in more than 150 US cities walked off their jobs on Thursday, the latest in a series of strike protests demanding a higher minimum wage and the opportunity to unionise. These labour disruptions were part of a campaign that began two years ago with nationwide strikes and that...
FIREFIGHTERS are coming from all over the country to protest in Bucks over the sacking of firefighter Ricky Matthews. Matthews was sacked for coming out on strike. The demonstration is taking place at Oakfield Road Park, Aylesbury, Bucks HP20 1LL It is assembling at 11:30am, next Tuesday 9 December. Firefighters’ union, the FBU...
JUDGES have ruled that the system of spying used by the British state does not breach the European Convention of Human Rights. The case claiming GCHQ’s spying techniques constituted a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights was brought by Amnesty, Privacy International and others. Whistleblower Edward Snowden exposed...
THE Tory Chancellor, George Osborne, was described in the bourgeois press as being ‘rattled’ by the news coverage of his Autumn Statement. In fact, ‘rattled’ goes nowhere near the rage he exhibited towards the BBC and their ‘totally hyperbolic’ reporting on the savage cuts he outlined on Wednesday. What got Osborne...
CITIZENS of the US, Georgia and Lithuania have been granted Ukrainian citizenship in order to be key ministers in the new counter-revolutionary government of Ukraine, based in Kiev. President Poroshenko has also announced he will sign a decree to grant citizenship to all foreigners (mercenary forces raised by...
By Tithi Bhattacharya – a professor of South Asian History at Purdue University, and a long time activist for Palestinian justice THIS week UAW 2865, representing thirteen thousand student workers across nine University of California campuses, could become the first labour union in the US to join the Palestinian-led movement...
STUDENTS demanding the abolition of tuition fees, who had occupied Senate House at the University of Warwick on Wednesday afternoon, were sprayed in the face with CS gas by police and then threatened with a Taser. The 25 students, who were part of Warwick Free Education group, said they...
ITV staff are to ballot for strike action over pay. BECTU said: ‘Union officials at ITV have rejected the company’s latest pay offer for 2015 and will be recommending a ‘yes’ vote to their members in an upcoming ballot for strike action. ‘The development follows discussions over weeks in which the...
CHANCELLOR Osborne delivered a class war Autumn Statement yesterday which revealed Tory plans to completely smash up the Welfare State. Starting with a gloomy assessment of the world capitalist crisis, he said: ‘The warning lights are flashing over the global economy, Japan is in recession, the eurozone is stagnating and...
DEMONSTRATORS have called for the US unions to take strike action, in united action with the mass uprisings against the police which have spread to every corner of the US. On August 9, 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, Michael Brown, an 18-year-old black teenager was shot...
IN HIS Autumn Statement on the economy, Chancellor Osborne outlined many more years of severe austerity with billions more in welfare cuts to be made alongside many years of below-inflation ‘wage rises’ for the public sector. This was after making a fleeting reference to the growing storm and the...
FIREFIGHTERS in England have announced a further 24 hour strike to take place next Tuesday in the escalating battle over pensions. However no strike action was called in Scotland and Wales due to ‘ongoing negotiations’. The strike will take place from 9.00am on Tuesday 9th December. Matt Wrack, FBU general secretary,...
SHARES in the privatised Royal Mail are down 2.5% after Ofcom ruled the universal postal service, which obliges the Royal Mail to deliver across the UK for one price, is not under threat, despite the warning from the Chief Executive of the Royal Mail that it was unaffordable. Ed Richards,...
A 600 strong demonstration marched to Downing street to stop the eviction of 92 families from the New Era housing estate in Hoxton, Hackney. The protest began with a lobby of Westbrook offices in Berkeley Square, central London. The company took control of the New Era estate earlier this...
LABOUR Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls has said, if elected, a Labour government would match the Tories cut for cut. He said that Labour would be ‘tough on the deficit and tough on the causes of the deficit too’. Balls’ comments came in anticipation of Tory Chancellor George Osborne’s Autumn Statement delivered...
THIS year’s Black Friday anti-Wal-Mart protests in the US were the widest-reaching ever, with pickets and strikes at 1,600 stores in 49 states to remind shoppers that the people serving them often can’t afford to feed themselves. The AFL-CIO union federation said on the eve of the protests: ‘Today is...
THE new Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi has announced that an investigation has uncovered that the Iraqi state was paying the wages of 50,000 ‘ghost soldiers’ whose wages were being pocketed by corrupt senior officials. This revelation will come as no surprise either to Iraqis, or to the US and...
‘WE will not be moved!’ declared 600 furious residents of the New Era Estate in Hoxton, Hackney and their supporters at a mass lobby of Westbrook offices in Berkeley Square, central London yesterday. Westbrook took control of the New Era estate earlier this year and jacked the rents up by...
WEST Midlands Chief Fire Officer (CFO) Phil Loach has written to members of parliament in the West Midlands urging a negotiated settlement be found to the ongoing firefighters’ pension dispute. In his letter to the West Midland MPs CFO Loach states that the pension dispute can only be resolved by...
THE US working class is now definitively on the march after six days of action in the town of Ferguson culminated in calls for a ‘Communist Revolution’ and for the National Guard to turn their guns on the bosses! On Black Friday, a real unity was established between the...
‘WE need a communist revolution,’ shouted crowds of angry protesters outside Ferguson, St Louis, police station on Friday night. Hundreds of people gathered in the Missouri city on Saturday as protests continued for a sixth day against the grand jury decision not to charge white police officer, Darren Wilson, who...