Monthly Archives: June 2015
EALING Hospital workers and other workers throughout Ealing and Southall are stopping work for two hours tomorrow and joining the march to keep the Maternity Unit open. Ealing Hospital Maternity has delivered more than 3,000 babies a year, for many a year, but management intends to close it down tomorrow....
IN its latest annual report, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the ‘central bank of central banks’, has warned that capitalism is ‘defenceless’ against the next economic crash. According to the BIS the monetarist policies pursued by the world’s central banks have not only failed to overcome the banking meltdown...
AMERICAN jurist Mary Davis, who headed the independent United Nations probe into the events of 2014 aggression on the Gaza Strip, said that Israel must re-examine its policy of using its military might, because it led to what she called ‘unprecedented destruction and to the killing of about 1,500...
THE Syriza party won the last Greek general election with its declarations that once elected it would put an end to the austerity dictatorship from Brussels and Berlin that has pauperised the Greek people. It immediately began to crumble and like the Labourites in the UK began to peddle a...
STATEMENT BY THE REVOLUTIONARY MARXIST LEAGUE Athens, Saturday 27/6/15 For a strong class ‘NO’ vote in the referendum! No to the austerity accords! Out of EU, IMF and NATO! For a workers’ and poor farmers’ government! THE Greek working class, youth, poor farmers and small shopkeepers and professionals, must deliver a strong class vote of ‘NO’...
A CAMPAIGN team was out on Southall Broadway yesterday fighting for this Wednesday’s march and occupation to stop the closure of Ealing Hospital Maternity Unit. At the same time, campaigners were visiting shops to get them to close for two hours on Wednesday as well as visiting Gurdwaras, temples, churches...
TEACHERS’ unions and charities joined the condemnation of the Tory policies that have driven over two million children into poverty. Office for National Statistics figures published on Thursday recorded 2.3 million children living in poverty and 9.6 million individuals were on relative low incomes in 2013-14. Meanwhile, the government is...
THE debt talks between Greece and its international creditors collapsed on Thursday night with German Chancellor Merkel telling the Greek PM Tsipras to shut up, and members of the Syriza government accusing the Troika of seeking to organise a Greek right-wing coup against the elected government. The reality is that...
EALING Hospital workers are stopping work for two hours next Wednesday 1st July and joining the march and occupation to save the hospital’s maternity unit. And they are calling all workers and shops in the area to do the same. GMB union members, employed at the hospital by private contractor...
THE occupation of Ealing Hospital is in full swing, with shifts ensuring that the entrance to the closure-threatened maternity department is occupied 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Local residents,workers, students and youth have all signed up to the rota to ensure that the maternity department at...
THE number of children living in poverty in the UK remains 2.3 million, government figures show. This situation has seen thousands of families depending on food banks to feed themselves, while teachers’ trade unions have said that many of their members are now bringing clothing and food to school with...
EALING Hospital staff members and patients welcomed the occupation of the entrance to the closure-threatened Maternity Unit yesterday. The occupation, to keep the unit open, organised by the West London Council of Action began on Wednesday afternoon at approximately 1pm. The Council of Action has called another march for Wednesday July...
THE BATTLE for a living wage is escalating, with Southampton Solent University and Norwich City Football Club, being the latest employers who have now pledged to pay their workforce the living wage. The Greater London Authority has calculated the 2015 living wage as £9.15 an hour for London and the...
THE West London Council of Action spoke out and acted for many workers yesterday when it launched the occupation of the Maternity Unit at Ealing Hospital to stop it being closed. Its statement read: ‘This is no protest action. We know that if they close the maternity in...
Disabled people occupied the Central Lobby of Parliament yesterday against the abolition of their Independent Living Fund (ILP). They attempted to storm parliament itself, causing a melee and were pushed back by the police. John McDonnell said: ‘Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC), have taken direct action on the anniversary of...
Ealing Hospital is Occupied! Local residents, workers and youth occupied the entrance to the Maternity Department of Ealing Hospital yesterday to stop its closure. The hospital management and their security forces tried to bar the way to the Maternity Department and used the police – who were not too...
A United Nations commission of inquiry has confirmed Israel committed ‘war crimes’ during the 2014 aggression against the Gaza Strip last summer. The United Nations Independent Commission of Inquiry into the 2014 Gaza conflict issued a press statement on the UN Human Rights website, saying it has gathered ‘substantial...
YESTERDAY the former ‘hammer’ of the teachers trade unions, Michael Gove, the new Justice Secretary who wants to abolish the Human Rights Act, was parading his alleged concern for the poor. He said that the ‘creaking and outdated’ justice system in England and Wales is failing society’s poorest, while...
GP LEADERS at the BMA’s Annual Representative Meeting (ARM) have called on the Care Quality Commission (CQC) to suspend its current inspection regime after delegates overwhelmingly passed a motion describing the CQC as ‘unfit for purpose’. Dr Chaand Nagpaul, BMA GP committee chair said: ‘Even though the vast majority...
EALING Hospital workers are ready to welcome the occupation of the maternity unit today. Today, the hospital management intends to commence turning away expectant mothers from Ealing Hospital maternity unit and to close it for good. The West London Council of Action is marching through nearby Southall to the hospital today...
ISRAELI police arrested two Palestinians early on Sunday during a police raid on the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Issawiya, while the Israeli army arrested three Palestinians, including a woman, in the West Bank, according to local and security sources. Member of the follow up committee in Issawiya, Raed Abu Riyaleh,...
PM Cameron was yesterday pledging ‘action on welfare’ to ensure, as he put it, that ‘work is always a better option’ – not by raising wages but by cutting the benefits of the poor. Cameron has returned to the historic Tory theme that there is something basically wrong with the...
TORY changes to immigration rules, will mean thousands of NHS nurses being driven out of the UK ‘causing chaos’, the RCN nurses’ union warned yesterday. The NHS relies on the thousands of highly trained nurses from India, Africa, the Caribbean, the Philippines and many other countries all over...
The Maternity unit at Ealing Hospital is set to close tomorrow, Wednesday 24 June. This is a disaster for the densely populated part of London covering Southall, Ealing and Acton. A mass march is taking place from 11am in Southall to the hospital ready to occupy the Matenity to keep...
‘IT’S BABIES, the newborns coming into this world, they must be protected and they must continue to be born in Ealing Hospital,’ Southall College student Cleopatra Sweeney told News Line yesterday morning. Speaking ahead of Wednesday’s march into Ealing hospital to occupy and stop the closure of the maternity unit...
OVER 250,000 people took part in a huge anti-austerity demonstration in London on Saturday, organised by the People’s Assembly. They took part in a rally outside the Bank of England before marching to the Houses of Parliament. Union leaders and celebrities including Russell Brand and Charlotte Church addressed the crowds. Tens of...
THE 250,000 workers and youth who marched on Saturday, along with the thousands who also marched in Glasgow and Liverpool, proved once again that the working class hates the Tory austerity regime, and despises Labour’s ‘more humane austerity’ look-alike version of the same policy. It is becoming more and more...
ADDRESSING the BMA’s Annual Representative Meeting (ARM) this morning, Dr Mark Porter will reaffirm the BMA’s position on seven-day hospital services – that patients should have access to high quality healthcare whenever they need it. But he urges the government to ‘show us the detail of what you mean. Show...
INTERNATIONAL ‘free trade’ agreements represent the attempt by the vast multi-national capitalist corporations to completely dominate the globe. The domination they seek is over everything from the right of nations to improve wages, introduce laws regarding health and safety, down to insisting that all state-owned industries and services are...
‘THEY HAVE abolished capital punishment in this country, but closing Ealing maternity is a sentence of death for mothers and babies,’ Greenford Bus Garage Unite Rep, Hashi Jarma said yesterday morning. He spoke to News Line as busworkers at the garage pledged to support next Wednesday’s march and occupation of...
IN THE British Medical Journal this week, two doctors criticise Australia for passing legislation that may be used to silence doctors working with asylum seekers. The Border Force Act 2015 says that from July 2015 contracted workers including doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals face a prison sentence of up...
SYRIA’s Prime Minister Wael al-Halaqi on Wednesday met Iraqi Water Resources Minister Mohsen al-Shummari, discussing with him means to expand cooperation and establish joint projects. Premier al-Halaqi stressed the need to boost political, economic, and commercial relations between the two countries and to find new ways to bolster security in...
ASLEF has announced a July 8 strike on London Underground after members voted overwhelmingly for strike action in a dispute over pay and rostas. ASLEF said: ‘The company’s decision to try to force through, without negotiation, new rosters would mean Tube drivers will have to work an unlimited number...
YESTERDAY, Tory leader David Cameron hosted a breakfast meeting with the president of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, as part of his campaign to persuade the heads of the EU to allow Britain to re-negotiate the terms of membership. In advance of this meeting, the general secretary of the TUC,...
Just six weeks in power and the Tory government are so weak and divided that they can only survive through the treacherous support of the Labour Party. This was the message hammered home by the vote in parliament on Tuesday night over the arrangements for the in-out referendum on keeping...
‘CLOSING Ealing Hospital maternity is a real attack on the NHS and a real attack on the people of Southall, Ealing and surrounding areas,’ Dave Wiltshire, National Secretary of the All Trades Unions Alliance, told a meeting of more than 100 workers, students and youth on Tuesday night. The meeting...
PM Cameron was rescued by Labour from a humiliating defeat in the House of Commons on Europe on Tuesday night after he faced his first significant rebellion of the new Parliament by Tory eurosceptics. Some 27 Tory rebels, supported by, among others, all 56 SNP MPs, six DUP MPs, four...
THE crisis in Greece has reached breaking point this week with the unelected European Commission threatening to declare a ‘state of emergency’ in the country over the refusal of the Syriza government to agree austerity cuts demanded in return for a further bail-out of the bankrupt Greek economy. The cuts,...
Al-QAEDA linked jihadist Mokhtar Belmokhtar, who allegedly masterminded the siege of an Algerian gas plant in which 38 hostages died, has been killed in a US air strike, Libya’s internationally recognised government said on Sunday. ‘American jets conducted an operation which resulted in the deaths of Mokhtar Belmokhtar and a...
THE right to decent work, an end to the banks’ veto on mortgage resolutions and the abolition of water charges are among the measures in a new policy platform drawn up by Right2Water activists at a conference in Dublin on Saturday. These policy measures will be presented at meetings across...