Monthly Archives: September 2015

THE TORIES ‘are declaring war on organised Labour in this country’ Jeremy Corbyn, newly elected leader of the Labour Party, told delegates at the TUC Conference in Brighton yesterday. He said that on Monday ‘the Tories put the second reading of the Trade Union Bill to Parliament and sadly it...

DELEGATES at the Trade Union Congress in Brighton voted unanimously yesterday to defend the right to strike and political protest. They voted for Composite Motion 18: The Trade Union Bill and Building a Campaign to Stop Government Attacks. They voted overwhelmingly, with just a few against, for Motion 64: Anti-Trade...

TRADE UNIONISTS have called for pre-emptive strike action to defeat the anti-union laws that the Tory government are attempting to push through parliament. The Trade Union Bill, which attacks the fundamental right to strike, had its second reading in the House of Commons yesterday. Birmingham and West Midlands GMB Regional...

THE Swiss based Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has just issued its starkest warning yet that the entire debt fuelled international banking system is heading for an immediate collapse. The BIS, which is often called the ‘bank of central bankers’, was established in 1930 with the remit of acting as...

MORE than 100,000 people marched through central London from Hyde Park to Parliament Square on the REFUGEES WELCOME HERE! march on Saturday. The march was in response to the mass movement of refugees currently fleeing into Europe from imperialist war-ravaged countries in the Middle East and Africa. It was instigated...

THE left wing backbench MP, Jeremy Corbyn, won a stunning victory in the Labour Party leadership contest on Saturday, as the working class gave its ‘thumbs down’ to the Tory look-alikes of Labour’s right wing! The sheer scale of his victory left the right wing of the party looking dismayed...

TRADE unions yesterday welcomed the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour Party leader. This was after the explosion of working class anger inside and around the Labour Party against the Tories, and Labour’s ‘Tory look-alike’ leadership which saw Corbyn win almost 60% of the vote in the first round of...

‘TUC get off your knees! Call a general strike!’ shouted an enthusiastic Young Socialists lobby of the first day of the TUC Congress in Brighton yesterday. The determined 100-strong lobby continued to chant: ‘No boot camps! No zero-hours contracts! Youth demand jobs!’ ‘Hands off Syria! Trade unions must act!’ and...

US school teachers are on strike in Washington state, defying a strike ban. Pasco Association of Educators have been on strike for two weeks. The first day of school was cancelled when contract negotiations broke down and PAE have been on strike ever since – even after a county judge...

IN A speech yesterday, the Tory prime minister, David Cameron, promised to privatise every public service in the country, to ‘open up’ public services to private companies and break up what he called ‘state monopolies’. The state monopolies Cameron has in mind cover every single part of the state. He...

ISRAELI forces early on Thursday detained four Palestinians from several West Bank districts. Two Palestinians were detained from Jericho, another from Jerusalem and one from Jenin. Israeli forces raided al-’Auja town to the north of Jericho, where they detained two Palestinians after breaking into and ransacking their homes. The detainees...

FOLLOWING the uproar questioning the legality of the UK drone assassination of a British citizen in Syria, a letter to the UN casts doubt on Prime Minister’s claims to Parliament that the UK was acting in ‘self defence’. On Monday, on the same day as Cameron told MPs that strikes...

IN A LANDMARK judgement the European Court of Justice has ruled that care workers in the UK must be paid for their travel time. The EU ruling states that care workers should now be paid for the time spent travelling from home to work and back again. It also...

PM Cameron made it perfectly clear in the House of Commons on Wednesday that he is determined to go to war in Syria to bring down the legitimate government of President Assad with or without the approval of Parliament. Under the pretext of ‘solving’ the refugee crisis, Cameron insisted that...

‘THE most vicious attack on the rights of British workers for a generation, to create state-sponsored victimisation of trade unionists.’ This is how construction workers’ union UCATT described the Tory Trade Union Bill, which is due to have its second reading in the House of Commons this month. It has...

REDDITCH GPs have been asked by commissioners not to refer to a local acute trust for at least three months to allow the hospital to clear up its backlog of operations. The chair of NHS Redditch and Bromsgrove CCG, Dr Jonathan Wells, shared the letter online which asked GPs ‘to...

A PICKETING president? Independent senator Bernie Sanders said it could be him. ‘Yeah, I might. That’s right. Why not?’ Sanders said when asked about the possibility after addressing American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) union members on Saturday in Altoona, Iowa. The day before, Sanders picketed outside a...

‘ARREST the war criminal now!’ shouted more than 500 Palestinians and their supporters outside 10 Downing Street yesterday, as they demonstrated against visiting Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. They shouted: ‘Netanyahu, what do you say – how many children have you killed today?’ and ‘From the river to the sea,...

FAMILIES are being ripped apart because the Home Office refuses to let mums and dads join their children and spouses in the UK. This is the conclusion of a damning report released yesterday by the Children’s Commissioner for England. The report states that at least 15,000 children are separated from...

IT IS becoming clear that the Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, is very scared about the effects of the expected rise in interest rates. Carney has been writing to 135 managers of Britain’s largest investment funds demanding to know if they have enough cash to pay out...

WITH his announcement on Monday that he had personally authorised the killing by drone of two young British citizens in Syria, Cameron revealed himself to be both the assassin of people and the assassin of bourgeois parliamentary democracy. Two years ago, Cameron suffered the humiliating defeat of his motion to...

THE Tory government yesterday conceded that a ‘hit list’ of names of several ‘British jihadis’ were drawn up at the meeting of senior national security council members that approved the drone strike that killed Cardiff-born 21-year-old Reyaad Khan. The existence of a ‘hit list’ comes to light as Tory Defence...

15,795 HOMELESS Londoners have been forced into temporary accommodation outside their borough, a Freedom of Information request revealed yesterday. Representing a third of the 47,137 homeless Londoners, these families are placed in Bed & Breakfasts or hostels outside of the boroughs responsible for housing them. This has produced...

MORE than 300 senior British Airways cabin crew at Gatwick Airport have been threatened with the sack if they refuse to accept a pay cut of up to £9,000 a year. The cabin managers have been sent letters warning that unless they agree to accept the lower paid roles as...

YESTERDAY in Parliament, Tory PM Cameron admitted that the UK conducted a secret, illegal airstrike on Syria, targeting and killing a British national. The ‘suspect’ was not tried in a court of law, simply taken out by a military drone in a criminal assasination. This action was in complete...

LESS than a week before the start of the TUC’s annual conference, the Tory government has unveiled a whole raft of new proposals to criminalise strikers and pickets with the ultimate intention of making every strike illegal and every worker actively supporting a strike liable to be dragged in...

‘ON this Labour Day, CWA members aren’t taking it easy. Across our union, we’ve been mobilising for fair contracts, organising new members, fighting back against a bad trade deal, and taking on voter suppression and the obscene amount of money in our political system,’ said Communication Workers of America...

NEWS LINE congratulates the German workers who have given a big welcome to the Syrian and other refugees who have shown such an indomitable spirit in their march from Macedonia to Munich. We also send our best wishes to all those who have signed up to march from Marble Arch...

THE pay packets of regional workers will take a hit and communities will suffer if new workplace changes recommended by the Productivity Commission and backed by the Abbott Government, go ahead, warns the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU). Speaking at the Productivity Commission’s first public hearing in Bendigo, Victoria...

LABOUR MPs must ‘work with’ whoever is elected leader later this week, Harriet Harman has said pleading with Labour’s right wing not to split the party if Corbyn wins the election. The party’s acting leader said Labour had to rebuild with an effective opposition leader and also someone who was...

OVER 83,000 people have signed up to support the march through London to Downing Street on Saturday called by Solidarity with Refugees. The march will assemble at 12pm at Marble Arch on Saturday September 12th. The call to welcome all refugees from Syria and other war zones was put out...

‘ALMOST a million people could have their homes repossessed because they have no way of paying off their interest-only mortgages,’ Citizens Advice warned yesterday. New research from the national charity estimates 934,000 people have interest-only mortgages and do not have a plan on how to pay it off when their...

REFUGEES stood their ground yesterday in Hungary, defied the police and refused to go to a ‘refugee camp’. They said that they had purchased rail tickets for Germany and that was where they intended to go. They added that on Saturday morning they would be marching to the border. Their train...

SURGING conflict and political upheaval across the Middle East and North Africa are preventing more than 13 million children from going to school, according to a UNICEF report released on Thursday. The report, ‘Education Under Fire’ focuses on the impact of violence on schoolchildren and education systems in nine countries...

THE annual conference of the TUC, due to start a week tomorrow, is the first conference of the leadership of the trade union movement since the election of a majority Tory government. Last year’s TUC conference was dominated by the overwhelming message not to rock the boat, that the only...

A DESPERATE migrant threw himself, his wife and his child on to the train track in Hungary yesterday screaming that he would rather die then be sent to a camp. Hungarian police immediately rushed in, manhandled him and his family, dragging them off the tracks, handcuffing him and taking...

A PALESTINIAN prisoner who has been in solitary confinement for eight years in Israeli jails has recently been suffering a psychological and neurological disorder, according to the Commission of Prisoners’ Affairs. Karem Ajwa, an attorney with the Commission, said 33-year-old Mohammad Jubran Khalil from Ramallah has in recent months been...

A VERY young toddler was washed up on a Turkish beach on Wednesday, while his mother was also among those drowned at sea trying to reach safety in Greece from the war in Syria. Yesterday, European workers were shocked to see Czech police writing numbers on the arms of refugee...

A MEMORIAL will be unveiled at 07:30am (GMT) on Saturday 12th September 2015, at Freedom Corner in Uhuru Park, Nairobi to remember the many thousands of Kenyans who suffered torture and abuse at the hands of British forces at the end of the colonial era (1952-1960). In 2013, following a...

THE reactionary parties that were assisted by the EU and the US to take power by the coup on February 22 2014, that placed Poroshenko in power, are now fighting and killing each other, with three soldiers killed and over 160 policemen injured in Monday’s clashes alone, after a...

A YEMENI family whose relatives were killed in a US drone strike have appealed to a German court to ensure that a US base in the country is not used for further attacks, which might endanger their lives. In May 2014, a court in Cologne heard evidence from Faisal bin...

HAVOC is being wreaked on the lives of thousands of private tenants by rogue landlords, Shelter reported yesterday. New research found that over 125,000 private renters in England suffered abuse, harassment, threat or assault from their landlord in the last year alone. However, alarmingly, the survey by the housing...

‘WE need an effective and sustainable solution, not a sticking plaster,’ said Jon Skewes, of the Royal College of Midwives, yesterday. Responding to Monitor, the Tory NHS regulator’s announcement about controlling agency staffing, Skewes stated: ‘The NHS spent £3.3billion on agency staffing in the last year, a rise in cost...

The United Nations is to launch an inquiry into whether Tory attacks on the disabled have led to ‘grave or systematic violations’ of their human rights. The Department of Work and Pensions revealed last week that 2,380 people died within six weeks of being thrown off benefits after being declared...

PULSE, the GPs’ magazine, has done a great service for all NHS users by using the Freedom of Information Act to find out how ‘Personal Health Budgets’ were spent in England in 2014-15. As far as NHS England is concerned Personal Health Budgets are a great success, and in its...