Monthly Archives: April 2015
THE TUC on Tuesday rubbished Cameron’s claim of good news in the economy and slammed Tory plans to outlaw strikes. It was commenting on the latest inflation figures published on Tuesday, which show Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation at zero per cent for the second month in a row,...
THE UN refugee agency has said once again that not enough is being done to save the lives of the tens of thousands of migrants who are being driven by hunger to try to cross the Mediterranean from Libya to Europe. A UNHCR spokesman said yesterday that around 400 migrants,...
A THIRD of GPs are considering retiring from general practice within the next five years according to the latest figures from the BMA’s survey of 15,560 GPs. The results call into question the feasibility of election pledges in recent manifesto announcements from political parties promising to dramatically increase the number...
SIX months after donors pledged billions of dollars for devastated Gaza, most of the money remains blocked, and reconstruction efforts are painfully slow, a coalition of aid groups said on Monday. Their report also condemned the international community for failing to help open the blockaded Palestinian territories up to each...
CAMERON began his election manifesto speech yesterday morning by insulting the intelligence of the listeners by stating ‘We are the party of working people, offering you security at every stage of your life.’ When Nye Bevan in the late 1940s pledged to the working class that Labour would bring ‘security...
THERE was incredulity yesterday when Cameron declared the Tories are ‘the party of working people’, adding that the ‘good news in the economy’ was leading to ‘the good life’. One journalist asked: ‘Labour said they are the party of fiscal responsibility; you say you’re the party of working people. Will...
FRANCE was hit with a massive national strike last Thursday against spending cuts and austerity measures imposed by the socialist government of Francois Hollande, the hugely unpopular three-year-long austerity plan to cut public spending by 36 billion euros ($50 billion) to bring the French national budget deficit...
POLITICAL ‘role reversal’ is the phrase being bandied about by bourgeois political commentators as they scratch their heads trying to make comparisons between the election manifesto’s of Tory and Labour. From page one of Labour’s manifesto, launched by Ed Miliband yesterday in Manchester, the party’s leadership went overboard to stress...
ED Miliband yesterday assured the bankers that a Labour government would cut the current account deficit in each year of its office. Launching his party’s election manifesto in Manchester, he stressed: ‘This is a plan to change our country. ‘And it is a manifesto which shows Labour is not only the...
SIPTU Bus Drivers in Dublin Bus and Bus Éireann have voted by over 90%, in both companies, in favour of industrial action and strike action in a ballot counted last Friday afternoon, 10th April, in Liberty Hall, Dublin 1. The ballot resulted from the breakdown of Labour Relations Commission (LRC)...
THE Greek working class and the youth are suffering under the ‘Iron Heel’ of the Troika (the European Union the European Central Bank and the IMF) as are all of the workers of Europe. There is over 28% adult unemployment and over 60% youth unemployment in Greece. There is huge...
‘WHOEVER forms the next government must grow the nursing workforce,’ Royal College of Nursing (RCN) Chief Executive & General Secretary Dr Peter Carter warned yesterday. The warning came in the RCN’s final Frontline First report before the General Election, The Fragile Frontline, which found there are fewer nurses than...
NEXT week Washington will host the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. At this gathering, the world’s economic policymakers will once more be facing the herculean task of trying to work out exactly what is going on as capitalism internationally is battered by a never-ending...
THIS week all pretence that the illegal regime, that took power in an imperialist-inspired and financed coup last year, rests on ‘popular democratic’ support, collapsed with the announcement that the neo-Nazi leader and founder of the Right Sector, Dmitro Yarosh, has been appointed as military advisor to the country’s...
WALTHAMSTOW’S WRP election premises were opened on Thursday evening to a loud cheer from campaigners and supporters who had gathered outside the shop. Workers Revolutionary Party candidate Jonty Leff told the crowd: ‘John Reed wrote a book on his first hand experience of the Russian Revolution called “Ten Days That...
THE Greek National Federation of Railworkers (POS) has expressed its ‘disappointment’ at the government’s intention to privatise TRAINOSE (Greek Railways). In a statement issued on Thursday, POS said: ‘We will defend the railways which are the Greek peoples’ property.’ Following the Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’ visit to Moscow...
RESTAURANT Brands which owns the KFC, Pizza Hut, Carl’s Jr and Starbucks chains has committed to end zero-hour contracts by July this year in a new collective agreement negotiated with New Zealand’s Unite Union. Unite has 2,000 members at the chain and is recommending the new terms to members in...
THE Health Services Journal (HSJ) has just revealed that the NHS Trust Development Authority (TDA) officials are keeping confidential (that is well hidden) until after the general election, information showing which NHS trusts are unlikely to have a future as independent organisations – in other words, are unlikely to...
‘EALING Hospital A&E and Maternity must not close and it’s a disgrace that the Labour candidate refuses to commit to this,’ Scott Dore, Workers Revolutionary Party candidate for Ealing Central and Acton said yesterday. On Wednesday afternoon, the WRP Scott Dore campaign team was in central Acton, where the Labour...
ON March 30th the Central Executive Committee of the South African trade union federation, COSATU, voted to expel its democratically elected General Secretary, Zwelinzima Vavi. At the same meeting the CEC roundly slammed shut the door on any chance of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, NUMSA, being...
YESTERDAY in Warwick, Labour leader Miliband mustered a battery of very ‘moral’ arguments about ‘fairness’, and the colonial origins of non-dom status, as if these were necessary to convince workers that the sickening situation, where billionaires from around the planet are made welcome to the UK on the basis...
LABOUR leader Ed Miliband yesterday pledged a Labour government would abolish the non-domicile rule that allows some wealthy UK residents to limit the tax paid on earnings outside the country. In a speech titled, ‘The Fabric of Our Country’, at the University of Warwick, he said: ‘Under a Labour government...
RAIL union RMT confirmed today that it has declared a dispute and is preparing an industrial action ballot on Great Western services. This is after FirstGroup confirmed in a letter to the union that it is laying out the ground to axe guards and catering services on the new InterCity...
THE BWI (Building and Wood Worker’s International) union federation has undertaken a fact finding mission on the deadly building collapse in Mongla Cement Factory in Bangladesh. ‘Lessons are not being learnt in Bangladesh – again the use sub-standard material, structural deficiencies and neglecting health and safety standards took away eight...
LABOUR leader Miliband’s refusal to fight for socialist policies and answer massive austerity with a campaign to replace bankrupt capitalism with socialism has seen him forced to bring back the completely discredited Tony Blair to try and win votes from the right wing, since Blair is far...
THE expansion of food banks across the United Kingdom is associated with cuts in spending on local services, welfare benefits and higher unemployment rates, conclude researchers in The BMJ this week. In collaboration with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Rachel Loopstra and David Stuckler at the Department...
HUNDREDS of ISIS terrorists, aided by Al Qaeda’s Jabhat al-Nusra, have entered Yarmouk refugee camp near Damascus, the Syrian Foreign and Expatriates Ministry said, anticipating ‘more crimes against the camp’s locals.’ In two identical letters to the UN Secretary-General and head of the UN Security Council, the ministry pressed the...
TO say that the international banking system and the world stock markets are in a state described as ‘nervous’ is to do great injustice to the depth of the panic gripping them. The latest manifestation of their unease is the warning issued over the weekend by their representatives about...
HUNDREDS of mineworkers armed with wooden sticks, employed at the Skouries gold mine in the Khalkidiki area of northern Greece, on Sunday morning supported police riot squads in an attack on a rally of villagers calling for an end to the mine’s operations. Eyewitness K. Iglezi, a Coalition of the...
THE American viewing public got a stark warning from the billionaire Donald Trump during a recent TV interview when he announced that Americans should prepare for ‘Financial Ruin’. In stark contrast to the narrative pushed by the Obama administration and faithfully repeated by the bourgeois media that US capitalism has...
THE SNP would not vote against privatisation in the English health service provided it has no impact on Scottish spending, Scottish Health Secretary Shona Robison has said. The SNP MSP confirmed her party would respect the principle of English votes for English laws, including its right to seek more private...
THE giant international bank HSBC is ‘cast-iron certain’ to break the regulatory rules, the laws which are supposed to govern banking practices, again. These were the words used to describe the bank by one of its most senior executives, HSBC’s global head of sanctions. The man responsible for ensuring that the...
A FAILURE to train enough staff in the NHS is leading to an over-reliance on agency staff, locums and overseas recruitment which is wasteful of money and undermining patient care, a new report published yesterday from the cross-party think tank Civitas warns. Researcher Edmund Stubbs argues that insufficient investment in...
THE NHS is today fighting for its life, with even more savage cuts to come after the election. The Tories are actively planning to regionalise the NHS, creating a number of separate entities (starting with the Devo-Manc local NHS) that will be much easier for the privateers to gobble...
THE Palestinian Mission in the UK on Wednesday issued ‘Questions and Answers on the Accession of the State of Palestine to the International Criminal Court (ICC)’. Why was the ICC established? The international community established the ICC in July 2002 to prevent the commission of war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide,...
THE Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA) and Independent Greeks party (ANEL) coalition government, has confirmed that it is to implement a privatisation programme. This includes the port of Piraeus, all the regional airports and the horse racing properties and betting. Responding to criticism from the port of Piraeus dockworkers and...
THE Tory Party, its media wing and the boss class as a whole are getting very worried about the election, and what is to happen afterwards – when the worldwide crisis of capitalism further deepens, and the working class of the world, especially of the UK, is faced with...
A NATIONAL bus and rail strike by SIPTU and NBRU drivers is looming in Ireland. SIPTU announced on Tuesday it is to ballot its members in Bus Éireann and Dublin Bus for industrial action, up to and including strike action, over the government’s plans for the potential privatisation of up...
BOTH the Greek Port Workers’ Union and the Greek Seafarers’ Union on Monday condemned the Greek government’s intention to privatise the port of Piraeus, the largest in Greece and in the east Mediterranean. The unions said that the Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA) programme states unequivocally that all Greek...
THE Arab summit has been deciding that it will form its own armed force based on Egypt and Saudi Arabia to fight subversion, extremism and Iran, but not of course Israel! These ‘coalition’ states are currently engaged in or supporting the bombing of the Yemen, and are preparing for an...
EGYPTIAN President Abd-al-Fattah al-Sisi has hailed Arab state leaders for ‘agreeing on the principle of forming a joint Arab military force’ to face the region’s security and terrorist threats. At the meeting in Egypt’s Sharm al-Shaykh resort wrapping up the 26th Arab League summit, Al-Sisi, who had recently proposed...