Monthly Archives: May 2015
WASHINGTON — The nation’s most powerful labour leader, vowing to defeat President Obama’s key trade legislation in the House next month, warned Hillary Clinton of serious political consequences if she fails to take a stand against the Pacific trade pact that the president is campaigning for as a major...
DOCTORS, midwives and local residents yesterday spoke out against the closure of Ealing Hospital maternity unit, planned for the 1st of July. Ian McKenzie, doctor of anaesthetics, a Unison and BMA member, told News Line: ‘It is going to be so inconvenient and unsafe for the local residents, especially if...
THE head of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde, admitted on Thursday that she could not ‘preclude’ Greece being forced out of the eurozone. This is after four months of negotiations about securing another bail-out for the shattered Greek economy have floundered in the face of the IMF and ECB...
AT EALING Hospital yesterday morning, midwives, nurses and other workers told News Line that they want trade union action to stop the closure of the maternity department on 1st July and they would support an occupation. Three midwives said: ‘We are sad and frustrated. ‘You can ask any of the clients...
ON MAY 7 Labour won the Ealing Central and Acton seat from the Tories, with Rupa Huq getting 22,002 votes, a massive 13% increase in the Labour vote. Huq got her seat because of the desire and the determination of workers locally to defend Ealing hospital, and especially to...
TRADE union leaders on Wednesday reacted angrily to the Tories’ planned anti-union legislation and welfare cuts announced in the Queen’s Speech. Paul Kenny, GMB General Secretary, said: ‘This is just the same old Tories who are anti-trade union and anti-working people having a voice and anti-democratic. It’s one rule for...
THE Queen yesterday outlined that her government ‘will legislate in the interests of everyone in our country. It will adopt a one nation approach’. This ‘one nation’ turns out to have massive exceptions, starting with its seven million trade unionists, plus its millions of youth, its rent paying tenants, and...
‘WORKING people will be worried by a Queen’s Speech that declares open season on so many of their rights and protections,’ said TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady yesterday. She continued: ‘A government that claimed to be on the side of working people now wants to tip the balance of power...
THE capitalist EU is being battered senseless this week by an economic crisis that is relentless and a working class that is refusing to pay the price for keeping a bankrupt system staggering on. All week, finance ministers from across the eurozone, along with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), have...
THE financial crisis facing the North of Ireland’s Health Trusts is so severe that four out of five Trusts have failed to break even in both 2013 and 2014, a new report released yesterday has shown. In the report, Auditor General Kieran Donnelly confirmed that the health and social...
DEMANDS are growing for President Jacob Zuma to release the Marikana report, with 300 wounded and arrested miners now threatening to take him to court to force him to make it public. The Farlam Commission of Inquiry, headed by retired judge Ian Farlam, was launched to investigate the killings of...
FAMILIES across the UK are being forced to cut spending on essential items such as food, clothing and heating as a result of government cuts to child benefits, a new report has found. Low-earners are among the hardest hit, the research suggests. Published by the End Child Poverty campaign, the...
IRISH Congress of Trade Unions General Secretary Patricia King has warmly welcomed the overwhelming ‘yes’ vote in the marriage equality (gay marriage) referendum saying it was a ‘remarkable day in our history,’ won by a landslide 63% to 37% vote, with a record-breaking turnout. In fact, only one area...
ISRAELI interrogators are using ‘oppressive and brutal’ methods to frighten Palestinian detainees and force them into confessing to attacks against Israel, the Palestinian prisoners’ committee head said on Sunday. Palestinian Authority Minister for Prisoners’ Affairs Issa Qarage, made his comments during a visit to prisoners’ families in the northern West...
LAST Friday, May 22nd, the dockworkers union of all 29 US West Coast ports voted overwhelmingly to ratify a tentative contract agreement reached in February with employers represented by the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA). Members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) voted 82% in favour of approving the...
THE Bank of England was yesterday exposed as planning to deceive the public over research it is carrying out into the financial risks of the UK leaving the EU. A senior BofE official ‘inadvertently’ sent an email about this ‘confidential project’ to an editor of the Guardian newspaper – an...
LAST Friday, the ‘independent’ health care regulator, the Care Quality Commission (CQC), finally issued its report on healthcare provision at the Barts Healthcare Trust, the largest trust in England. This report was damning, accusing the trust – which comprises six hospitals and other regional healthcare centres in north east London...
‘WE DO not want Free Schools, we want all Free Schools to be taken back under local authority,’ Tom Davies past president of Ealing National Union of Teachers (NUT) told News Line yesterday. He was responding to Tory Education Secretary Nicky Morgan’s announcement yesterday that yet another 500 privately run...
THE full extent of the Tory plans to smash up the right to free speech was revealed yesterday by an unlikely source, the new Tory business secretary, Sajid Javid. In a leaked memo to David Cameron, dated 12 May, Javid makes clear his opposition to Home Secretary May’s proposal to...
AN Israeli court on Thursday ordered the release imprisoned Palestinian MP Khalida Jarrar, the head of the Palestinian Authority’s Prisoners’ Affairs Committee said. Issa Qaraqe said that Jarrar will be released and forced to pay a 20,000 shekel ($5,180) fine. The court gave the prosecution 72 hours to appeal the...
‘GP SERVICES are already at breaking point,’ British Medical Association (BMA) GP Committee chair, Dr Chaand Nagpaul, warned yesterday, demanding that PM Cameron ‘get real’ and ditch his ‘surreal obsession’ with opening GP surgeries seven days a week. Tory pledges to recruit 5,000 GPs in England will ‘fail dismally’, as...
‘BY means of the banking system the distribution of capital as a special business, a social function, is taken out of the hands of the private capitalists and usurers. But at the same time, banking and credit thus become the most potent means of driving capitalist production beyond its...
‘WE need to fight like never before,’ Public and Commercial Services (PCS) leader Mark Serwotka told the union annual conference on Wednesday. Tory Government cuts are threatening a further 100,000 job losses in the civil service. ‘We need to commit ourselves to opposing the cuts, the closures of the offices, the...
‘EALING Hospital maternity department is to close by July 1st’, Pippa Nightingale Maternity Lead for ‘Shaping a Healthier Future’ told a meeting of Ealing Clinical Commissioning Group yesterday. There was an angry demonstration before the meeting where up to a hundred local residents, mothers and babies and trade unionists marched...
ON Tuesday, during a 4-day visit to Ireland, Charles, Prince of Wales and heir to the throne, had a private meeting lasting 20 minutes with the leadership of the republican Sinn Fein, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness. After the meeting Adams told reporters: ‘We did discuss the need for the entire...
NATIONAL Gallery staff are taking their 24th day of strike action today against the privatisation of the gallery. Today begins eleven more days of strike action which continues on Tuesday 26th May until Thursday 4th June. Their union PCS is holding a national rally in Trafalgar Square on May 30th...
TODAY the Police Federation’ annual conference will be addressed by the reappointed Tory Home Secretary, Theresa May, an event that the Federation’s leaders are clearly dreading. The reason of their dread is that at last year’s conference May broke with the traditional message of unswerving support for ‘our boys’ and...
‘OCCUPY Ealing Maternity Department to stop its closure on 1st July,’ Ealing Hospital nurse, Claire, a Unison member, told News Line on Monday. A demonstration in defence of Ealing Hospital has been called for today at Ealing Trailfinders Rugby Club, Vallis Way, Ealing, Greater London W13 0DD from 12.15pm, where...
HEALTH unions have threatened to strike over Cameron’s plans to create a seven-day-a-week health service, if it means cuts to the existing payments for working anti-social hours. Unison’s head of health, Christina McAnea, said: ‘Any move to a seven-day NHS must not cost staff a penny. Come after our unsocial...
LAST week the Greek Syriza government avoided defaulting on its debt repayment to the IMF by the skin of its teeth. Just before Tuesday’s deadline for coming up with 750 million euros they managed to come up with the money by the simple expedient of borrowing it from an emergency...
IN a letter sent to the White House on Friday, Sen. Bernie Sanders joined Sen. Elizabeth Warren and other Senate Democrats in urging President Obama to escalate his support for struggling Americans and get behind the ‘Fight for $15’ movement, which has galvanised low-paid workers across the nation in...
THE election of a Tory government has seen the class war sharpened to explosion point. Already new anti-union laws have been announced that will make legal strike actions impossible, and there have been immediate attacks on the teaching unions, with the declaration of plans to change the law, so...
APRIL marks three years since US student debt hit $1 trillion. Now $1.3 trillion and climbing – by thousands of dollars per second (link is external) – unpaid student loans are a burden for more than 40 million American families. It’s time to turn it around. That’s why the AFT has...
RATHER that waiting to make a statement to the new parliament, Tory Chancellor George Osborne announced through the Sun newspaper on Saturday that he will deliver a new Budget on 8th July. He claimed it would have ‘a laser-like focus’ on raising productivity and living standards. He claimed he was making...
‘FROM CAMERON downward there is policy coming from the top to deliberately drive working class families out of London and kettle them into certain areas of the country’, Jasmin Parsons from Our West Hendon told News Line. Jasmin was responding to new figures released yesterday, which show that evictions have...
TWO sets of statistics were issued last Thursday, statistics that prove conclusively what every worker in London and the big cities in England and Wales have known for years, that working class families and young people are being deliberately driven out of their homes by the government – a...
PALESTINIANS marked the 67th anniversary of the ‘Nakba’ or ‘the great disaster’ on May 12 with a festival through the Palestinian city of Ramallah. Thousands of Palestinians commemorated the 67th anniversary of the Nakba and renewed their demands to return to their cities, villages and lands that they were forced...
OSBORNE’S plans for English cities to have mayors and combined authorities with powers over housing, health care, transport, planning and policing mean that London, a centre for the international bankers, with a population of 8.6 million, will virtually become a separate country, a city state, while Greater Manchester and...
PRESIDENT Bashar al-Assad of Syria on Wednesday received the Chairman of the Iranian Shura Council’s Committee for Foreign Policy and National Security Alaeddin Boroujerdi and the accompanying delegation. Talks during the meeting dealt with the fraternal relations between Syria and Iran and the mutual commitment of both countries’ leaderships to...
A HIGH Court hearing took place yesterday to seek compensation for 122 GMB members blacklisted by Carillion and other construction employers. GMB said: ‘The High Court should apply the same standards on disclosure as in phone hacking and Libbor rigging scandals so that the world can see what the construction...
TORY PM CAMERON has just reprimanded the people of the UK for being ‘over tolerant’ of extremism, signalling that his regime is so unstable that it cannot tolerate what passed for freedom of speech any longer. Freedom of speech is to be turned into a criminal offence. This reprimand...