Monthly Archives: February 2015
‘IT is not enough for tuition fees to be reduced they must be abolished in their entirety!’ said Joshua Ogunleye, national secretary of the Young Socialists. He was responding to yesterday’s announcement by Labour Party leader Ed Miliband that if elected Labour would reduce tuition fees for university from next...
THE GERMAN parliament voted yesterday to extend the ‘bailout package’ to Greece by another four months, while in Greece workers erupted on the streets of Athens on Thursday night against the treacherous deal. The extension, approved by creditors last week in exchange for a series of Greek ‘government...
OVER 100,000 people in Britain could literally freeze to death over the next 25 years because they are too poor to afford to adequately heat their homes. This shocking figure of projected deaths due to poverty was revealed yesterday by the charity National Energy Action which has calculated that in...
NINETY Ealing Hospital midwives have written a shocking open letter condemning the threatened closure of their Maternity Unit, warning that the ‘rotting away’ of the service they provide puts many lives at risk. More than 3,000 babies are born each year at the hospital in Southall, west London. The letter from...
THE strike actions of US workers are growing apace and are achieving big successes as the working class begins to use its power. One week after Walmart, the US’s largest private employer, said it would raise hourly wages to $9, after a series of mass strike actions, the owners of...
ALMOST 700,000 people say their main employment is on a zero-hours contract, an increase of 111,000 on the previous year, according to a report out on Wednesday. The Office For National Statistics (ONS) report shows that the number of zero-hours contracts being used by employers has increased to 1.8 million. The...
GREEK Prime Minister and leader of SYRIZA (Coalition of the Radical Left) Alexis Tsipras convened a meeting on Wednesday of SYRIZA’s 149 parliamentary deputies to defend his government’s decision to agree last Tuesday to a four-month extension of the hated austerity accords imposed by the troika of European Union,...
‘NO privatisation!’ chanted over 70 PCS strikers and their supporters yesterday as they marched off from a rally outside the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square in central London to deliver a letter to gallery trustee’s chairman Mark Getty’s office near Leicester Square. Yesterday’s lunchtime protest took place on the last...
‘THESE plans for the devolution of the health budget to a Greater Manchester regional government truly lob a wrecking ball at the National Health Service,’ said British Medical Association (BMA) member Anna Athow yesterday. She was responding to the announcement that Manchester is to get full control of its health...
TEACHERS in Oaxaca, Mexico, have taken their fight against their government’s punitive ‘education reform’ to a new level this month, with highly visible actions against legislators, political parties and even airports. The Oaxaca teachers local has been camping out in the main square of the state capital since July, battling...
‘THIS dispute is not over,’ declared Fire Brigades Union General Secretary Matt Wrack at a packed 2,000-strong rally of striking firefighters in Westminster, central London, yesterday. Firefighters in England were taking 24-hour strike action over just-passed legislation which attacks their pension rights leaving them vulnerable to being sacked on fitness...
SYRIZA policy going into the general election, through which it came to office, was to write off most of Greece’s 322bn euro debt. It demanded a European Debt Conference modelled on the write-off of half of Germany’s post-World War Two debt. It said that it was going to scrap the...
FIREFIGHTERS in England are striking for 24 hours from 7am this morning in their long running dispute with the government over its unworkable pension plans. Today’s 24 hour strike coincides with a rally and protest in Westminster, assembling from noon at Methodist Central Hall, Storeys Gate, London SW1 9NH. Matt Wrack,...
‘THE TUC and its affiliates must fight for the policy they voted for, to increase the minimum wage to £10 an hour,’ Bakers Union Regional Officer Roy Streeter told News Line yesterday. Streeter was responding to the Tory-led coalition government’s move to name 70 companies that have failed to...
THE coalition government has named 70 companies that won’t pay workers the minimum wage. Even the government says that the 100 cases in the care sector being investigated are just the ‘tip of the iceberg’. The non-payers are a broad church from Delcom Systems in Salisbury, which owes £11,730 to its...
‘PRIVATISATION No Way!’ a lively picket of at least 40 strikers, chanted outside The National Gallery in Trafalgar Square yesterday, on the second day of their five-day strike against privatisation. The Gallery management has paid hundreds of thousands of pounds of public money to private company CIS to ‘temporarily’ take...
MP’s ‘Can’t live on £60,000 a year’. This was the defence put forward by Tory MP and former foreign secretary, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, to the latest ‘cash for access’ scandal involving both him and Jack Straw Labour MP, also a former foreign secretary. Both these prominent figures in their parties –...
JOIN the national protests around the country on Wednesday 4 March 2015, urges Australia’s Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU). The CPSU warns: ‘It’s not just public services that are currently under attack by the Abbott Government, our rights at work are under threat too. ‘It’s clear the recently announced Productivity...
AMERICA’S largest private employer, retail giant Walmart has announced plans to raise wages for more than 500,000 hourly employees at its US stores. Walmart said that it would raise salaries for 40% of its staff, as well as increasing its its base hourly wage to $9 – $1.75 above the...
THE Greek government decided on Saturday to accept all terms laid down in a statement agreed at last Friday’s Eurogroup Finance Ministers’ meeting that extends by four months the hated austerity accords. Greece must submit today a series of ‘reform measures’ to be carried out which must be approved by...
THE fact that the Greek working class brought Syriza from nothing to power, in the course of one general election, has been correctly taken to be the proof that the working class throughout Europe has had enough of the bankers imposed austerity, and is ready to defy the...
THE Warwick Commission’s final report, Enriching Britain: Culture, Creativity and Growth, launched on Tuesday, warns that the arts are being squeezed out of schools. Commission chairman Vikki Heywood said: ‘The key message from this report is that the government and the cultural and creative industries...
THE Greek Finance Minister has sent a letter of capitulation to the EU’s diktats, dated Wednesday 18 February 2015. It was sent to Eurogroup President Jeroen Dijsselbloem after Greece’s application for a six months’ extension of the hated bail-out austerity memorandum was refused. Greece’s letter was set to be discussed at...
THE once-mighty US economy is facing a wave of strikes by powerful sections of the working class who are determined to drive up their wages that have been savagely cut since the 2008 financial crash. This mass movement of workers has been met head on by the determination of US...
GUINNESS Trust tenants were celebrating a victory as the planned eviction timed for 10am yesterday morning was halted by a court hearing that ruled that Guinness Trust had no right to evict them. About sixty Guinness Trust tenants and their supporters joined a lobby outside the office...
DOCTORS have slammed a new scheme to drive workers who are sick back to work. The extremely controversial proposal will see workers who are off sick for four weeks in a year face a private company’s ‘fit-for-work’ test. The private company, Health Management Limited (HML), will then draw up a...
AS FAR as this reactionary coalition government is concerned, anybody who is sick for more than four weeks in a year is probably engaging in criminal action and defrauding the state. As a matter of course, the same standard is not being applied to the banks and the bankers, who...
ANGER has greeted the United Nations announcement that it will not report on its investigation into the genocide in Sri Lanka next month after all, with allegations that the United States and India are behind the delay. British Tamils Forum (BTF) said yesterday that it shares the deep disappointment and...
THE chief political commentator of the Daily Telegraph, Peter Oborne, who resigned from the newspaper on Tuesday, yesterday called for an independent review of the newspaper’s guidelines over its coverage of the HSBC tax scandal. Oborne claimed prominence was not given to the HSBC story because of commercial interests. In a...
HEZBOLLAH Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah delivered on Monday a speech commemorating the Resistance Martyrs, in which he tackled various internal and regional titles. As he thanked the people who abided his calls not to shoot in the air, white and yellow balloons were launched in the air from...
THE Independent Commission on Local Government Finance has said England’s local authorities need ‘urgent devolution of powers, funding and taxes’, and that Public Services like adult social care could ‘collapse’ unless councils get new funding powers. The report said that councils were on a ‘cliff-edge’ owing to cuts, and services...
ON Wednesday morning, the Greek government announced that it will be making an application to the Eurogroup for an extension of the loan agreement, that is the bail-out of austerity accords, for six months in a letter to Eurogroup President Jeroen Dijsselbloem. On Tuesday night in Brussels, the Greek Finance...
DAVID Cameron yesterday pledged that a future Tory government would ‘effectively abolish’ youth unemployment by simply forcing every young person to do ‘community work’ for which they would be paid a youth allowance. In his speech – which not only defended the Tory-led coalition’s savage attack on the unemployed and...
A GROUP of 93 Palestinians from Gaza visited relatives jailed in Israel on Monday, the International Committee of the Red Cross said. Spokesperson Suhair Zaqqut said that the group included 28 Palestinians under the age of 14 who visited 43 Palestinians held in Rimon jail. There are around 450 Palestinians...
THE Eurogroup meeting of finance ministers on Monday evening ended without agreement between the EU and Greece, after the Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis rejected the ‘extension’ of the austerity bail-out programme. This document presented by Eurogroup President Jeroen Dijsselbloem contained terms unacceptable to the Greek government, Varoufakis...
PRIME Minister Cameron stepped up his war against youth yesterday by launching the new Tory ‘Community Work Programme’. The programme forces youth to carry out 30 hours a week of unpaid ‘community work’ for six months or be thrown off benefits and onto the streets. Cameron boasted: ‘Our goal is...
EGYPT’S Air Force, on Monday morning bombed Islamic State positions in Derna, Libya, after IS beheaded 21 Coptic Christian Egyptians. The city was also bombed by planes loyal to General Haftar. He is the Libyan ally of the US and Egypt in the struggle for power that is now going...
IN their boldest move so far, supporters of the Islamic State in Sirte appear to have extended their hold over the town, seizing its Ibn Sina hospital. Meanwhile other IS fighters are reported to have attacked oilfields southeast of the town. They in turn are said to be being targeted...
THE disastrous Universal Credit scheme, despite being lambasted by the National Audit Office for wasting tens of millions of pounds of taxpayers money, began to be rolled out to a further 150 job centres across England and Wales yesterday. Plagued by problems, Universal Credit combines six benefits together...
‘ANY peaceful solution to the fighting in Syria must involve President Bashar al-Assad,’ the United Nations envoy to Syria Staffan de Mistura said Friday. ‘President Assad is part of the solution,’ de Mistura told a joint press conference with Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz in Vienna. ‘I will continue to have...
SAVAGE cuts policies are continuing to tear the heart out of the NHS! The entire consultant team, of four emergency consultants, running Accident and Emergency services at the Alexandra Hospital in Redditch, Worcestershire has resigned. A further consultant has resigned from the Worcestershire Royal Hospital. Staff were told the news on...
700 BRITISH artists have signed a pledge to boycott Israel as long as it ‘continues to deny basic Palestinian rights’. The group, Artists for Palestine UK, which organised the pledge stated yesterday: ‘In response to the call from Palestinian artists and cultural workers for a cultural boycott of Israel, we...
THE Greek government’s proposals for a new agreement over the terms of the bail-out loan of 240bn euros were discussed at this week’s Eurogroup and at the EU leaders’ summit. Although no agreement was reached, the President of the Eurogroup Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the Dutch Finance Minister, said on Thursday that...
THIS week the UN announced that 300 migrants had drowned after being forced into unseaworthy boats in a desperate attempt to escape the wars and poverty of North Africa by attempting the dangerous sea crossing to Italy. This is just the latest of the crimes of mass murder in the...