Monthly Archives: March 2015
IN his last budget speech before the general election, Tory chancellor, George Osborne, made the astounding claim that living standards will ‘grow strongly every year for the rest of the decade’, adding: ‘Now, the facts show households on average will be around £900 better off in 2015 than they...
THIS is what happened at West Hendon Estate last Friday It was a quiet day on the West-Hendon Front. No cement lorries driving down Tyrrel Way, in fact no deliveries came through at all, so it became a very peaceful day. We did notice that Barratt’s started using the service road...
LABOUR leader Ed Miliband, put on his Tory hat yesterday when he launched his party’s Business Manifesto, at business news agency Bloomberg and stressed the overriding importance of productivity. Imitating Brown and Blair’s ‘Businessman’s government’ he said: ‘Our plan is based on the idea that Britain can only succeed...
LABOUR has demanded the publication of reports costing £10 million, paid by the NHS to management consultants KPMG, which recommended closing hospitals and axing thousands of beds. Shadow health secretary Andy Burnham demanded the full details be published before the general election. He said: ‘The public, who have paid for...
OVER 400 trade unionists and supporters rallied and marched in central Manchester yesterday in opposition to the Tory ‘Devo-Manc’ plan to fragment and privatise the NHS. The event was organised by the Greater Manchester Association of Trade Councils, which is calling for a referendum on the plan. Addressing the rally, Annette...
AT THE same time as Saudi Arabia and other Gulf state planes, with US support, are bombing the Yemen and its Houthi Shia rebels, who have been fighting the Al Qaeda movement in the Yemen, US Secretary of State John Kerry has cancelled his pre-arranged return to the USA...
MIDWIVES and doctors unions have responded to Labour leader Miliband’s pledge to find ways to increase NHS funding. Dr Mark Porter, BMA council chair said: ‘The test of any health policy should be whether it benefits patients, yet 95 per cent of doctors do not believe the quality of patient...
THE general election campaign by both Tories and Labour kicked off on Thursday night with separate television interviews of Cameron and Miliband. While Miliband was reduced to insisting that he really was ‘tough’ enough for the task of rescuing British capitalism, Cameron pledged more austerity. While Cameron claimed ‘recovery’ from the...
General Election – Thursday 7 May 2015 ALL over Europe the anti-austerity revolution is raging and on May 7 workers in the UK will deliver their own blow by bringing down the Tory-led coalition regime! During the Tory-led coalition’s rule, despite the raging economic crisis, the bankers, bosses and the rich...
GREATER Manchester Association of Trades Union Councils (GMATUC ) has called a mass NHS emergency protest rally for Sunday to protest against the plan to end the NHS by localising it. This is to start in Greater Manchester with the ‘Devo Manc’ plan to hand over the Greater Manchester NHS...
THE National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa in KwaZulu-Natal (KzN) working closely with other like-minded and class orientated COSATU affiliates, will swamp the streets of Durban, Friday 1st May 2015, as part of May Day celebrations. The planned march is a break from the paralysed COSATU’s traditions of holding...
SAUDI Arabian forces, joined by nine other countries, have launched a military operation in Yemen against Shi’ite Houthi rebels, the Saudi ambassador to the US, Al Jubeir, has said. The offensive, which started with air strikes, will also involve ‘other military assets’, and has the support of the United...
LAW student Erol Incedal has been cleared at the Old Bailey of planning a terrorist attack in a secret prosecution, closed to the public. Turkish-born Incedal, 27, was found not guilty after the jury deliberated for a total of 27 hours and would not accept the ‘secret evidence’. Most of the...
STUDENT occupations are spreading! Students have occupied the London School of Economics on March since Tuesday March 17 demanding free university education for all. By Thursday March 19th students at the University of the Arts London occupied Central St. Martins College in North London against the management’s decision to cut 800...
JAMES Bullard, the head of the St Louis Fed, told a recent City Week Forum in London that investors are far too complacent and could be in for a very nasty shock in the coming months as the US interest rate rises. ‘I think reconciliation between what markets think and...
‘ANOTHER slap in the face!’ was the verdict of Pam Duggan in response to Tuesday’s Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) report which cleared armed officers of any wrongdoing when they shot and killed her son, Mark, in 2011. The 500-page report, which took three-and-a-half years to produce, claimed 29-year-old...
‘NO more games with our A&Es,’ doctors demanded yesterday in the wake of the intense A&E crisis over the winter. Doctors union, the BMA, said that A&E departments across England have experienced one of the worst winters on record, with the NHS missing its four-hour A&E waiting time figure every...
OVER 100 defiant occupying students at the University of Arts London (UAL) were joined by students from the LSE occupation and other universities and other supporters for a public rally on Monday evening at Central Saint Martin’s College. Speaker after speaker declared that the occupation is continuing until their demands...
CAMERON is now going into the May 7th general election with a declaration that he does not intend to serve a third term, that is if he is elected for a second. As a matter of record he was not elected to a first term! Even after the massive financial...
‘We were very angry today, we are not giving up, we are determined to save our service and we are very shortly going to be holding a protest outside Royal London Hospital.’ Aysha Begum, Bangladeshi Parent Adviser (BPA) campaign leader, was talking to News Line on Monday at the end...
THE ROYAL College of Nursing have warned of a ‘woeful lack’ of trained nurses as it emerges that untrained care assistants are ‘putting patients at risk’. Healthcare assistants are working without proper training or supervision, being left alone on wards with up to 40 patients, with junior staff asked to...
DESPITE all the propaganda pumped out by Osborne in his budget speech last week, about UK capitalism ‘walking tall’ and well on the way to a glorious future of prosperity, facts have the annoying (for him) habit of exploding the fantasy of recovery that he is so desperate to...
PRESIDENT Bashar al-Assad stressed on Sunday that Syria is keen to keep working to push forward Russia’s efforts for holding a second round of inter-Syrian talks in Moscow. On January 26-29, the Russian capital hosted a round of talks that brought together representatives of the Syrian government and opposition figures...
AROUND 100 angry family members demonstrated against the threatened closure of their Bangladeshi Parent Adviser (BPA) service yesterday, marching from Chrisp Street Market in Poplar, east London, to Tower Hamlets Town Hall. BPA is a Community Disability Service funded by the NHS and managed by Tower Hamlets Council. Disgusted at being...
WHILE the NHS is being brought to its knees financially through austerity cuts, with hospitals and entire health authorities facing bankruptcy, NHS privateers are raking it in, making full use of off-shore tax avoidance schemes to boost their profits. A new report by Tax Research UK has thrown a spotlight...
EGYPTIAN naval forces detained nine Palestinian fishermen off the coast of southern Gaza on Friday, a local union official said. Nizar Ayash, head of Gaza’s fisherman’s union, said that Egyptian naval forces stopped a motorboat carrying nine Palestinian fishermen and took them away to an unknown location. Ayash said the men...
GREEK Prime Minister Tsipras is meeting German Chancellor Merkel in Berlin today, with officials in Brussels, Berlin and the ECB now openly acknowledging the risk that Greece could leave the eurozone. Ahead of the visit, Tsipras said the meeting would be ‘an opportunity to talk without the pressure of any...
IN a full-page article in Thursday’s Guardian newspaper, the leader of the country’s biggest union, Len McCluskey, announced that the Unite executive had unanimously agreed to recommend to the membership a change in the union’s rule book. The executive will be calling for the deletion of the words ‘so far...
EAST London GPs, patients and supporters on Thursday staged a protest in Limehouse against cuts in funding that threaten to bankrupt around a dozen surgeries in Tower Hamlets. Maggie Falshaw, chair of Save Our Surgeries, told News Line: ‘We’re here because the government has changed the way it funds general...
LSE occupation statement ‘Why we are occupying We have occupied the Vera Anstey Suite, the central meeting room of the university administration, to demand a change to the current university system. LSE is the epitome of the neoliberal university. Universities are increasingly implementing the privatised, profit-driven, and bureaucratic ‘business model’ of higher...
REPRESENTATIVES of Greek students’ unions along with hundreds of university students carried out mobilisations last Thursday in Athens and Thessaloniki. The three main demands of the students’ unions are the abolition of University Councils, an authoritarian body made up of professors and business’ representatives, the reintroduction of the Academic Asylum...
IN Greece, the Syriza government, which was elected to break with the Troika of the European Commission, the IMF and the European Central Bank, has capitulated to all three. It now accepts that Greece will have to repay its ‘debts’ to the EU bourgeoisie and the IMF, and carry on...
‘ONCE we know we are ready it will take just six weeks to close the maternity at Ealing,’ Pippa Nightingale, Head of Midwifery, Imperial NHS Trust told the NHS Ealing Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) meeting at Ealing Town Hall on Wednesday afternoon. Angry midwives, mothers with their Ealing babies...
LAST Tuesday, in a visit that was kept quiet, the American Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland (she oversaw the pro-imperialist coup in the Ukraine), visited Athens and met with Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias, and Defence Minister Panos Kammenos. The Athens...
EAST London GPs, patients and supporters yesterday staged a protest in Limehouse against cuts in funding that threaten to bankrupt around a dozen surgeries in Tower Hamlets. Maggie Falshaw, chair of Save Our Surgeries, told News Line: ‘We’re here because the government has changed the way it funds general practice. ‘As...
AS the devastating war in Syria entered its fifth year on Sunday, the US said it would have to negotiate with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as it seeks to ‘reignite’ new peace talks. ‘Well, we have to negotiate in the end. We’ve always been willing to negotiate in the context...
CHANCELLOR Osborne yesterday outlined ‘a Britain that is growing, creating jobs and paying its way’. He added more Walter Mitty observations such as: ‘The latest projections show that living standards will be higher than when we came to office.’ However he warned that Britain was not the master of its fate....
STUDENTS and unemployed youth have occupied the Law School building of Athens University in the centre of the city demanding the closing down of the high security prisons, the release of the relatives of those arrested accused of terrorism as well as the release of gravely ill Savas Xiros,...
TORY Chancellor Osborne yesterday delivered a Budget that continues the savage austerity war on the working class, while handing billions to big business and the banks. Despite Osborne’s claim of ‘a Britain that is growing, creating jobs and paying its way’, Labour leader Miliband pointed out that the Tories have...
AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL has accused the Syrian government of war crimes after it bombed the city of Raqqa, in northern Syria, which ISIS is seeking to turn into the capital of its Caliphate. The Damascus government says it is attacking ISIS, but Amnesty said Syrian government aircraft had targeted areas densely...
SUNDAY marked two years since five boys from the northern West Bank village of Hares were arrested over an alleged stone-throwing incident that saw all five charged with attempted murder, despite strongly contested evidence. The five Palestinian teenagers, aged 16 to 17 at the time of their arrest, each face...
TOMORROW the Tory chancellor, George Osborne, will be presenting before parliament his last budget before the general election on May 7 – a budget he promises will contain ‘no giveaways, no gimmicks’. Wednesday’s budget, of course, is meaningless and despite any promises will be designed precisely to convince the Tory...
THE Turkish authorities have captured a person working for the intelligence agency of a coalition country in connection with the journey of three teenaged British girls to Syria, supposedly to join the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Thursday 12 March. The...