Monthly Archives: June 2015
David Cameron, was at his most nauseating, hypocritical best yesterday when he delivered a speech marking the 800-year anniversary of the signing of the Magna Carta. The ‘good name’ of human rights, Cameron announced, has become ‘distorted and devalued’ in Britain and it has fallen to his ‘generation’ to restore...
THERE was enormous support for tonight’s meeting to stop the closure of Ealing Hospital Maternity Unit yesterday morning. Hospital workers, patients, local residents and youth bought tickets for the meeting and pledged to come on next Wednesday’s march. Adam Kumar, a young student, said: ‘The community badly needs Ealing Hospital. ‘They should...
‘IN 2013, for the first time since World War II, the number of those forcibly displaced from their homes exceeded 50 million,’ warns an Amnesty International briefing published yesterday. Its executive summary continues: ‘Millions more have since been displaced as a result of conflict and crises around the globe. ‘More than...
A PETITION launched by campaign group Change.org has called on the Courts and Tribunal Service to force the release of data on the number of disabled people who lost their lives because of government austerity measures. The petition demands that it orders the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) publish...
SIXTY-SEVEN years after the Palestinian Nakba of 1948, when Israel was founded by a massive Zionist terror against the Palestinian people, the Palestinian Prisoners’ Affairs committee head Issa Qaraqa has commented that Palestinian prisoners today are facing a legal Nakba carried out by the Israeli government and its...
SOME 95,000 Palestinian children have been detained in the West Bank since it was occupied by Israel in 1967, most of whom were exposed to widespread, systematic and institutionalised abuse, a West Bank-based NGO has revealed. In a special report published on Wednesday, Military Court Watch (MCW) cited 200 testimonies...
SOUTHALL families are unanimous that Ealing Hospital maternity and A&E departments must not close. Over the weekend, scores of tickets for tomorrow night’s meeting to fight to stop the closure of the maternity this month (see ad this page) were bought. Pledges to join the march through Southall to...
THE Independent Police Complaints Commission issued a report on Friday detailing the findings of its two and a half year long inquiry into the actions of the police at the notorious ‘Battle of Orgreave’ during the 1984-85 miners’ strike. On 18 June 1984, a miners’ mass picket of British...
THE NUMBER of UK strike actions is growing! A Public and Commercial Services union representative sacked by the National Gallery was likely to have been unfairly dismissed for her union activities, a tribunal has found. Candy Udwin, suspended in February on the eve of the first strike over privatisation and sacked...
THOUSANDS of workers and students took part in marches held in several Greek cities last Thursday evening against any agreement which will continue the austerity policies between the Greek government and the EC-IMF-ECB troika. In Athens, over 10,000 workers participated in a Greek Communist Party demonstration and another 1,000 marched...
‘OCCUPY to save Ealing Hospital, the time to act is now,’ Bill Rogers, train driver, chairman of Chingford ASLEF Branch and Secretary of the North East London Council of Action said yesterday morning, speaking on the picket line outside the closure-threatened west London hospital. Midwives told News Line that they...
THE British Medical Association yesterday warned that further NHS cuts will compromise patient care. It was responding to the publication of a review into NHS efficiency by Lord Carter, which claimed ‘efficiencies’ in NHS Trust spending can ‘save’ £5bn a year. Dr Paul Flynn, chair of the BMA consultants committee, said:...
TRADE union members working at Ealing Hospital yesterday bought their tickets for next Tuesday’s meeting and pledged to march and occupy to defend the maternity unit which the management intends to close on June 24th (see ad this page). Unite member Prithpal Marway, a healthcare assistant, bought three tickets for...
CHANCELLOR Osborne used his annual address at the Mansion House on Wednesday night to announce that he will be selling off the government’s share in RBS to the City of London at a loss estimated to be £13bn, and that he is also seeking to dictate what future governments...
A DIFFICULT road for the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal in the House of Representatives got much worse on Monday, when trade unions and pensioners demanded no cuts in Medicare to finance the trade deal. Labour unions and senior citizens’ groups launched efforts to lobby House members against a bill that...
THE revelation by Sky News of the ‘Stingray’ programme, where fake mobile phone towers are set up to capture people’s mobile calls without their knowledge, and that the same process can be used to plant material on their phones without their permission, is yet another confirmation that the UK...
‘WE WON!!! Clean Clothes Campaign (CCC) is delighted to announce a major campaign victory with the confirmation that the Rana Plaza Donors Trust Fund has finally met its target of $30 million, following a large anonymous donation.’ The CCC said on Tuesday that it has been campaigning since the disaster...
‘WE ARE all very upset, my colleagues and I are being told to go and work elsewhere. We will support the meeting and the march,’ an Ealing Hospital midwife told News Line yesterday. Ealing Hospital workers, patients and visitors bought tickets yesterday for next Tuesday’s meeting called to stop the...
THE great EU referendum crisis in the UK has sharpened after PM Cameron denied his earlier remarks that after he had negotiated a deal with the EU as a basis for a referendum, his cabinet members would have to campaign to support it with a ‘yes’ vote or resign. A...
THE ‘Civil Society Conference on the Electricity Crisis’ took place last week in Johannesburg, South Africa and declared: ‘The electricity crisis calls for de-corporatisation of Eskom and putting the electricity utility under real public control.’ The Conference was officially opened by National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) Deputy...
WHETHER British capitalism should remain within the crisis-ridden, sinking ship of the EU, or strike out on its own has immediately split the Tory party, forming a group of up to 70 eurosceptic Tory MPs, with a number of supporters in the Tory cabinet. This is despite the fact that...
ON SUNDAY Israeli warplanes shelled a location north of the Gaza Strip while the Israeli army declared a full closure of both Beit Hanoun and Karem Abu Salem border crossings under the pretext of rocket fire from Gaza. According to WAFA (Palestine News Agency) correspondent in Gaza, Israeli warplanes have...
FAMILIES’ credit card debt is set to soar at two-and-a-half times the rate of wages, as families desperately take out credit to avoid starvation and eviction. The TUC yesterday criticised Tory Chancellor George Osborne for expecting families to ‘bail out his faltering recovery on their credit cards’, adding that such...
SHAKER Aamer, the last British resident detained at Guantanamo Bay, has spoken out about his treatment at detention centres in the US and Afghanistan, claiming he was tortured in the presence of British soldiers and MI5 agents. Aamer has been held at Guantanamo for 13 years without trial. His lawyers...
ALARMING new figures from housing charity Shelter have revealed more than 8,300 people in England were put at risk of losing their home every week in the last year – the equivalent of 50 people each hour. Shelter said: ‘In an analysis of statistics from the Ministry of Justice, the...
A SALAFIST group yesterday claimed responsibility for a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip towards the Israeli town of Ashkelon on Saturday night, as Israel carried out retaliatory airstrikes on what is left of Gaza City. In a statement, the Salafist group, calling itself ‘Sheikh Omar Hadid-Bayt al-Maqdis,’ claimed that...
WORSE then a zero-hour contact, supermarket giant Marks & Spencers will only guarantee their staff at the Swindon distribution depot seven hours of work a week, the GMB union has said. Seven hours of work would earn a worker at the depot just £45.50 to live on, significantly less then...
THE head of Al-Qaeda’s Syria affiliate, the Al-Nusra Front, Abu Mohamed al-Jolani, has described the rival Islamic State group’s self-proclaimed caliphate as ‘illegitimate’ in a wide-ranging television interview aired on Wednesday. In the second part of his appearance on the Qatari-owned Al-Jazeera news channel, al-Jolani criticised IS at length...
BUSWORKERS bought their tickets for the June 16th meeting to stop the closure of Ealing Hospital Maternity Unit yesterday. Last month, the Ealing Clinical Commissioning Group announced that they would be closing Ealing Hospital Maternity Unit by 1st July, then two weeks ago the hospital management started sending out letters...
GREECE’S Syriza government delayed yesterday’s 300m euros (£216m) debt repayment to the IMF, saying that it will pay over to the Troika (the EC, the European Central Bank and the IMF) at the end of June all four instalments due, combined into a single payment of 1.54 bn...
THE ‘SAFE staffing levels’ for hospitals across the UK have been suspended, sending alarm bells ringing throughout the NHS. This has prompted the Royal College of Nurses (RCN) to warn yesterday that ‘straying from this course now would be failing both staff and patients’. The National Institute for...
LECTURERS were on strike at Lewisham and Southwark College yesterday over 112 sackings because of the closure of the Southwark site in Camberwell, southeast London. The 112 job cuts include the Lewisham Way and Deptford sites. There was a lively picket outside the Lewisham site by 25 lecturers...
WORKERS from Lear plants across the country entered the company’s annual shareholder meeting on Thursday morning (28th May) and spoke directly to Lear Corp. CEO Matthew J. Simoncini and the company’s Board of Directors to demand good jobs and safe workplaces at its plants nationwide. Lear workers entered the shareholder...
EMBARRASSED MPs are appealing to Downing Street to make a new appeal to the IPSA body that sets MPs’ pay to abandon plans for a 10.3% increase in their salaries that is a £7,000-a-year rise. This pay rise comes at a time when UK living standards for tens of...
HOUSEHOLD debt has grown for the 26th consecutive month, reaching £1.47 trillion according to the Radical Centre for Social Justice (RCSJ). Household debt has soared by more than £34 billion in less than three years, exceeding the UK national debt which was at £1.26 trillion in 2014 and according to...
PALESTINIAN factions in the Gaza Strip have rejected what they said was a decision issued by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) to freeze recruitment due to a lack of funding. In a statement issued yesterday, the National and Islamic Forces Group said: ‘UNRWA’s decision...
THE Tories published an Education and Adoption Bill yesterday, setting out plans to academise a further 1,000 schools by 2020. Education Secretary Nicky Morgan warned that all schools deemed to be ‘failing’ or ‘coasting’ will be forced into becoming academies. The current requirement for potential academy sponsors to consult with...
YESTERDAY Health Secretary Hunt insulted the NHS, and NHS workers, and the intelligence of the working class as a whole, when he labelled the NHS an ‘industry’, and compared the greatest gain yet made by the working class, to ‘other industries’. He said of the NHS, which has saved millions...
‘IT IS important that those responsible for the terrible loss of life at Rana Plaza face justice. But thousands of factories in Bangladesh are still unsafe, putting more workers lives at risk’, Trade Union Congress (TUC) General Secretary Frances O’Grady warned. The TUC was responding to the news on Monday that...
ALL four of the declared candidates for Labour Party leader, Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper, Liz Kendall and Mary Creagh, have been busy over the past week making clear their total support for Tory cuts to welfare benefits and their desire to support any policy that ensures the survival...
BARNET Unison, members of Unite Community and local supporters were out on strike all over the north London borough yesterday in defence of public libraries and against cuts and the outsourcing of services. They will be out again today from 7am. Barnet plans to privatise the borough’s 14 libraries, first...
THE Tory government ‘should concentrate on expanding GP numbers rather than promising patients undeliverable services’, Dr Chaand Nagpaul, chair of the British Medical Association GPs Committee said yesterday. He was responding to figures obtained by Pulse GPs magazine, which cast serious doubt on Tory PM Cameron’s ability to carry out...