Monthly Archives: April 2015
THIS week it emerged that retired British general Sir Frank Kitson is to be sued by the widow of a Catholic worker murdered by loyalist paramilitaries in 1973. Eugene ‘Paddy’ Heenan was a building worker who was killed when a loyalist gang threw a grenade at the minibus taking him...
YESTERDAY PM Cameron pledged that a Tory government will introduce a law, within 100 days of taking office, guaranteeing no rise in income tax rates, VAT or national insurance before 2020. The desperate Tories are desperately seeking an election winner and have been driven to treat the electorate as...
THE Greek Vouli (parliament) approved late on Tuesday a government Bill that re-establishes ERT, the state national tv and radio network. This is a vindication and a victory of the ERT workers’ struggle who never ceased the fight to re-open ERT since it was closed down in June 2013 by...
THE commander of Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guards accused Saudi Arabia of treachery on Monday, saying the bombing of Yemen had put the kingdom in the same camp as arch foe Israel. The remarks, by General Mohammad Ali Jafari, are a further sign of deteriorating relations between Tehran and Riyadh, after...
RETIRED General Frank Kitson is being sued over the Loyalist murder of a Roman Catholic, Eugene Heenan in Northern Ireland in February 1973 and is accused of allowing Loyalist death squads to conduct criminal operations in the north. This case has certainly thrown the cat amongst the pigeons with the...
THE UK is in breach of its own UN human rights commitment to provide people with adequate homes, Just Fair, a consortium of leading charities, has warned. The consortium, whose members include Crisis, Oxfam, Amnesty International, Save the Children and Unicef UK, said: ‘England is experiencing a housing crisis. Exceptionally...
THE TUC’s head of European Union and International Relations Department, Owen Tudor, has recently given a lengthy interview to the internet EurActiv which specialises in publishing views on the EU. The interview is of interest not least because the TUC is not known for having views on the EU, or...
THE news that America intends to ‘flood the world’ with cheap liquefied natural gas (LNG) reveals just how far advanced US imperialism is along the road to war with Russia, China and any other country seen as a threat to its domination. The plans and preparations being put into action...
NEW research produced by the NHS Support Federation shows a dramatic rise in the contracts won by private firms to deliver NHS care. Over the period April 2014/15, companies have won awards totalling over £3.5bn, which is five times the previous year. The figures also show that the value of NHS...
A MAJOR row has broken out in the US over statements made last week by the United States Trade Representative (USTR), who claimed that murdering trade unionists did not violate labour standards in trade agreements. The USTR also went on to say that that ‘perpetuating violence against a trade...
THE total wealth of the richest 1,000 individuals and families in Britain has more than doubled in the last 10 years to £547bn, the 2015 Sunday Times rich list survey has found. So much for ‘we are all in it together’! Britain’s richest people are wealthier than ever before with a...
LABOUR Party leader Miliband yesterday pledged that the next Labour government will introduce legislation to cap rents so they cannot rise by more than the rate of inflation (CPI) during secure three-year tenancies. He also pledged legislation to: • Require landlords and letting agents to disclose the rent levels charged to...
DOZENS of Palestinians were injured in violent clashes across al-Tur and al-Issawiya neighbourhoods in occupied East Jerusalem on Saturday as Palestinians protested the death of Muhammad Abu Ghannam, 17, shot dead by Israeli police late Friday. The clashes in al-Tur were concentrated near the Mount of Olives and had broken...
ON April 17th, Palestinians and their supporters across the world came together on what is designated Palestinian Prisoners’ Day, a day of international solidarity with Palestinian and other Arab political prisoners held by the Zionist regime. According to the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club – an independent Palestinian organisation established in 1993...
THE one clear message that emerged from Cameron’s speech yesterday was that the political representatives of the capitalist class in Britain have given up on holding the United Kingdom together, and are so desperate that they are seeking to keep going by breaking it apart and retreating back to...
LABOUR leader Miliband yesterday indicted Cameron’s foreign policy in an attempt to win the support of the British bourgeoisie. He said of PM Cameron’s foreign policy: ‘It is time to reject the small-minded isolationism that has characterised this government. ‘It is an approach that has shrunk our influence and weakened Britain.’ In...
THIS week the organisation Defence for Children International-Palestine Section (DCI-P) published an in-depth report detailing the devastating effects on the lives of Palestinian children of Israel’s murderous assault on Gaza last summer. This assault, codenamed Operation Protective Edge by the Israelis, lasted for 50 days from July 8 to August...
THE imperialist criminal states – who supported the war on Iraq in 2003, the Security Council-backed NATO onslaught on Libya in 2011, and then the war against Syria, which killed hundreds of thousands of people, and made millions homeless – were in session yesterday to discuss the massive...
THE safety of elderly and disabled people who rely on homecare is being put at risk because staff are receiving inadequate training, according to a Unison study published yesterday. The survey of more than 1,000 care workers employed by councils and private firms across the UK, found that staff are...
‘I BELIEVE that young people and working class people are being treated very badly by the capitalist system,’ Workers Revolutionary Party candidate Jonty Leff, said in addressing the election hustings for Walthamstow, called by the Trades Council. The hustings took place on Tuesday evening at St. Mary’s Girls’ School in...
AMERICAN trade unions are claiming that the giant Walmart company is retaliating against its workers for the leading role they have played in the campaign for a $15 an hour legal minimum pay rate. This campaign against poverty level pay has swept the country drawing mass support from low paid...
THE reactionary Saudi regime – the pride and joy of the United States and UK ruling classes that have armed it to the teeth – and its allies in the Gulf are about to learn a lesson that its US-UK sponsors should have been able to explain to...
‘I AM voting for Workers Revolutionary Party candidate Jonty Leff because the WRP are the only party fighting for a future for young people,’ said student Tanischa Kargbo as she joined the WRP election campaign outside Waltham Forest College in Walthamstow yesterday afternoon. She added: ‘University must be free. I...
SAVINGS in the NHS over the past five years have been paid for by the workforce, a pre-election health debate heard yesterday. The packed hustings event was co-hosted by the BMA with a panel of health spokespeople from the main political parties. The packed hustings event was co-hosted by the BMA...
ISRAELI bulldozers demolished homes in the Bedouin village of al-Araqib village in the Negev for the 83rd time on Monday, in addition to a home in the Negev village of Atir, local activists said. Israeli police reportedly imposed a blockade on al-Araqib before carrying out the demolitions. Activist Aziz Siyah Abu...
LENIN’S definition of a revolutionary situation was one in which the ruling class could not rule in the old way, and was riven with crises and scandals of all kinds, and where the working class could not live in the way that it had become accustomed to, and...
SOUTH African President Jacob Zuma visited a refugee camp in the port city of Durban on Saturday after a fresh outbreak of anti-foreigner violence. Several politicians have accused immigrants of taking South Africans’ jobs in a country where the unemployment rate is 24%. Zuma told those who had fled the violence...
THE appalling death of up to 950 people fleeing the war-torn regions of the Middle East and North Africa has prompted the political representatives of European capitalism to rush to Luxembourg for an emergency meeting to discuss this ‘humanitarian’ crisis. Most of them support the ‘Australian solution’ – that the...
DOCTORS’ and nurses’ representatives yesterday condemned last year’s £35m of massive pay rises for NHS trust chief executives, while NHS staff have suffered pay freezes for five years. NHS accounts show hospital bosses netted £35m in 6% pay rises last year despite a 1% wage cap on nurses, midwives and...
THE federal government must deliver a plan for jobs to avoid Australia developing long-term structural unemployment, warns the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU). Thursday’s unemployment rate of 6.1% represents the tenth consecutive month Australia’s unemployment rate has been at or above 6%. The less than 0.1 percentage drop does nothing...
FOR many years the Labour Party projected itself as the champion of the working class, hence its very close ties with the trade unions, including the now defunct bloc vote. In response workers donated hundreds of millions to the party that they had founded through their trade unions. Blair and...
NEW young members joined the Vote Scott Dore WRP campaign team in West Ealing on Saturday afternoon. Atef Azeb, aged 17, said: ‘I don’t like David Cameron. He’s always making it harder for the people. ‘He’s changed the rules on exams. People used to be able to retake exams, now you...
IN a speech on immigration in the Wirral, north-west England, on Saturday, Ed Miliband pledged a Labour government would make sure everyone in Britain spoke English. He said that ‘everyone in Britain should know how to speak English. It is something we should expect from everyone who comes here, especially...
WORKERS in more than 230 cities in the US walked out to join mass protests against poverty level pay last Wednesday in what is undoubtedly the largest movement of workers and youth in modern US history. According to the organisers over 60,000 took part in the campaign organised around the...
AT its Spring Meeting in Washington this week, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) made a direct intervention in the general election with an undisguised appeal on behalf of the Tory party and its plans for even bigger austerity cuts. The party political broadcast on behalf of Cameron and Osborne was...
‘WE ARE marching on Saturday 2nd May to defend Ealing Hospital A&E and Maternity Departments,’ Scott Dore, Workers Revolutionary Party candidate for Ealing Central and Acton said yesterday. Speaking outside the closure-threatened west London hospital, Scott insisted: ‘We are demanding that the trade unions occupy to defend these services....
WEEKLY national figures from NHS England yesterday showed it has missed the four-hour A&E waiting time target for the 28th consecutive week. The proportion of patients seen within the government maximum of four hours at A&E departments in England is below the target of 95% again. This has not...
LAST Monday, three former employees of Blackwater, the notorious US military contractor, were sentenced to thirty years in jail for carrying out a massacre of unarmed Iraqi civilians in 2007. They had been found guilty at a trial last year on 13 counts of voluntary manslaughter and 17 charges of...
JUST retired NHS chief Sir David Nicholson CBE has left the NHS with a pension pot worth almost £1.9 million, after earning a basic salary of £211,000 – when many think he should have been sacked, in the aftermath of the Francis Inquiry and report into the disaster that...
TEACHING unions yesterday condemned the Tory-led coalition government’s free-school policy, as more than half a million families were discovering which primary schools their children will attend, amid a growing places squeeze. There are wide variations nationwide, with up to one in six missing out on their first choice of school...
THE NHS is facing a ‘substantial financial problem’ which politicians are ignoring in the election campaign, its former head, David Nicholson warned yesterday. Warning of mounting deficits, in an interview with the Today programme, Nicholson, who retired last year after running the NHS in England for eight years, said that...