Monthly Archives: November 2015
LEADING Tory Grant Shapps on Saturday quit as international development minister amid claims he failed to act on allegations of bullying. Claims have engulfed the Tories following the apparent suicide in September of youth activist Elliot Johnson, 21. Youth organiser Mark Clarke has rejected allegations of bullying, sexual assault and...
‘DON’T bomb Syria! Don’t bomb Syria!’ chanted a crowd of over 4,000 that blocked Whitehall opposite Downing Street on Saturday. The mass protest was one of 18 events organised by Stop the War Coalition. Stop the War co-founder John Rees slammed right wing Labour MPs and shadow cabinet ministers who...
TORY prime minister, David Cameron, is all set to make the biggest gamble of his political life on Wednesday by pushing forward a parliamentary vote on going to war in Syria. After losing a vote to wage war to oust the legitimate government of Bashar al-Assad two years ago, Cameron...
STUDENT nurses and midwives are furious that under new proposals to scrap bursaries, they could potentially be burdened with £65,000 worth of debt for a three-year degree. In his Autumn Statement on Wednesday, Chancellor George Osborne confirmed in his spending review that funding for midwifery and nursing education will now...
JUST when the eurozone bankers and capitalist class were congratulating themselves on beating the reformist Syriza government of Greece into submission, an even bigger threat has emerged in Portugal. This crisis, headlined in the press as representing a ‘watershed’ moment for the euro, is even more threatening for the EU...
‘INCOHERENT and dangerous’ – Stop the War responds to David Cameron’s case for bombing Stop the War believes that David Cameron’s incoherent proposals for action in Syria will do nothing to weaken ISIS but will instead inflame the civil war, deepen the misery of the Syrian people and increase the...
‘DEFEND Ealing Hospital! Support the junior doctors! Kick the government out!’ shouted the fifty-strong mass picket of Ealing Hospital to defend its vital services from being shut down yesterday morning. The picket, called by the West London Council of Action demands that the Maternity Department is immediately re-opened and...
TRADE union leaders responded weakly, without any call to action, to Chancellor Osborne’s Autumn Statement on Wednesday, in which he announced a massive extension of the Tory cuts and privatisation programme, along with a U-turn on the planned tax credit cuts. Nursing students are to be charged fees for their...
PRIME Minister Cameron yesterday claimed it is ‘in our national interest’ for the UK to launch air strikes on Syria. He made a statement to MPs in the House of Commons in response to the Foreign Affairs Committee report on extending British military operations to Syria. Cameron said: ‘The reason...
IN August 2013, MPs rejected by 285-272 votes UK military intervention by the Cameron government to bomb President Bashar al-Assad’s government out of power, and on that basis to reorganise the country and the region. Since then, we know that UK pilots, seconded to the US airforce, have bombed Syria...
MORE than 100 demonstrators were outside 10 Downing Street on Tuesday night to protest against Osborne’s Autumn Statement of £20bn more cuts due the next day. Yiannis Gourtsoyannis, from the BMA’s National Junior Doctors Committee, called on everyone to mobilise behind the Junior Doctors strike on Tuesday December...
CHANCELLOR Osborne announced a U-turn on the abolition of tax credits in his Autumn Statement yesterday, while massively extending Tory privatisation and cuts elsewhere. Nursing students are to be charged fees for their training for the first time and sixth form colleges are to be ‘academised’. Revealing ruling class fear...
CHANCELLOR Osborne was forced to make a humiliating retreat over working tax credits in the House of Commons yesterday after facing massive resistance to the tax credit cuts. The government was forced to publicly reveal its feet of clay. The tax credit announcement means millions of low-paid workers will not...
‘PATIENT deaths do not increase during doctor strikes,’ research has shown, as junior doctors prepare for their three days of action. The junior doctors are walking out on strike against the Tory government’s attempts to impose a new contract which will cut their pay and force them to work long...
‘WE will never tolerate such crimes,’ Russian President Putin declared yesterday, after Turkish fighter planes shot down a Russian Su-24 on the Syrian border. Putin said: ‘Today’s loss is a stab in our back delivered by terrorism’s accomplices. ‘I can’t characterise otherwise what has happened today,’ he added. Both Russian...
‘GENERAL PRACTICE – and the NHS as we know it – is in danger of disintegrating unless the Chancellor urgently increases investment in the family doctor service to meet the tsunami of increasing patient demand,’ Dr Maureen Baker, Chair of the Royal College of GPs (RCGP), said on Monday. Dr...
CAMERON told the House of Commons on Monday afternoon in his statement on national security strategy that: ‘On Thursday I will make the case for Britain to join our international allies in going after ISIL at its headquarters in Syria, not just Iraq. . .’ He added: ‘We will invest more than...
SEVERE Tory spending cuts are putting the future of local government, children’s services, health care and care for the elderly at risk of collapse, a new TUC report published yesterday has warned. On Wednesday Tory Chancellor Osborne is unveiling his ‘Five-Year Spending Review’ in which he will outline £20bn...
ONE-HUNDRED-AND-FIFTY workers, students and youth attended the rally to mark the 46th Anniversary of the News Line and the 75th Anniversary of the Assassination of Leon Trotsky on Sunday. The rally was held in Oxford House, Bethnal Green, east London. At the end of the rally there was the showing...
IN advance of the Tory chancellor, George Osborne, announcing to parliament on Wednesday his spending review, which will detail exactly how he intends to cut £20 billion from essential services, the TUC yesterday published its own report on the effects of all the austerity cuts made so far under...
PM Cameron is due to drive forward Tory war plans both at home and abroad this week. Today, he is meeting President Hollande to prepare the way for the UK to join France in a new crusade in the Middle East to overthrow the government of President Assad of Syria...
JONTY Leff the Assistant General Secretary of the WRP told the News Line Rally yesterday that ‘Today at this 46th anniversary rally we celebrate the struggle of Leon Trotsky, who alongside Lenin lead the 1917 Russian revolution, the first successful socialist revolution.’ He added: ‘This drove forward the world...
PRIME Minister Cameron is to set out his strategy on Syria and tackling the Islamic State group in the region before MPs this week. He will be seeking to persuade MPs to back UK military action against Syria by Christmas. Paymaster General Matthew Hancock said the chancellor will be spending...
PRESIDENTIAL elections should be ‘about what the consensus is among the Syrians’ President Bashar al-Assad said in an extensive interview to Italian TV channel ‘RAI 1’. First off he was asked: ‘How did you react to the news coming from Paris?’ President Assad: ‘We can start by saying it’s a horrible...
THE Metropolitan Police has made an ‘unreserved apology’ and paid an undisclosed amount in compensation to seven women who were tricked into long-term relationships with undercover police spies. In a statement yesterday, Scotland Yard admitted the women were deceived ‘pure and simple’. The unprecedented settlements relate to officers who worked...
NEXT week, the Tory chancellor, George Osborne, will be announcing the results of his spending review to parliament, outlining £20 billion of austerity cuts over four years. Spending on welfare, local government, education, and every other sphere of state expenditure will be cut to the bone in order to reduce...
THE junior doctors have responded magnificently to the Tory threat to dictate their contracts and to impose them from next August with a landslide 98% vote to take strike action, while over 99% voted for action short of strike action. The BMA stated yesterday that junior doctors had clearly been...
THE Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS), on the eve of the UN’s Universal Child Day, maintained that Palestinian children remain victims of the ongoing Israeli violence. ‘Due to the Israeli provocations and the repeated raids of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and daily attacks on the Palestinians, the Palestinian children...
JUNIOR doctors yesterday overwhelmingly voted in favour of taking strike action to defeat the government’s intent to impose a new junior doctor contract in England from August next year, said the British Medical Association (BMA). The BMA added: ‘Following a ballot of more than 37,000 junior doctors in England, more...
A REPORT on ‘behaviour management and restraint of children in custody’ reveals that ‘pain-inducing techniques’ are in frequent use in young offender institutions. Published by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons yesterday, the report focuses on the new system known as ‘minimising and managing physical restraint’ (MMPR) in child...
THE capitalist media and its Tory masters are working around the clock to drum up a majority for Cameron, made up of Tories and enough right-wing Labourites to win a vote in parliament for the UK to bomb Syria. Labour leader Corbyn is being assaulted from all sides to try...
AS the Tory government freezes school funding, a National Union of Teachers (NUT) survey shows the shocking impact of cuts so far. A survey of NUT representatives in England reveals the shocking effects budget cuts are having on schools and children’s education including: increased class sizes, fewer teachers and support staff, reduced...
FIREFIGHTERS in the West Midlands have warned they could be forced to take industrial action over plans to cut 300 firefighting posts, leaving the service understaffed, the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) warns. The proposed cuts to West Midlands Fire Service would mean it would have to rely on the ‘pure...
THE Equity trade union members who play the doctors and medical staff in the BBC medical drama Holby City have offered their full support to the junior doctors. The cast members plan to take strike action alongside the junior doctors whose strike ballot vote result is to be announced tomorrow...
NEARLY 2,000 new spies are to be immediately recruited by the British state, prime minister David Cameron announced yesterday. Speaking from the G20 summit being held in Turkey, Cameron said that government funding for the security services would be massively increased to provide for 1,900 more spies to be employed...
SECRETARY-GENERAL of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), Saeb Erekat, said in a statement on the occasion of Palestine’s Independence Day on Sunday, that only very few still believe that a two-state solution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict can be achieved. He said: ‘28 years after the painful historic compromise made by...
HEAVILY ARMED special SAS forces were ordered onto the streets of the UK, yesterday and told to ‘shoot on sight’ suspected terrorists as the UK hires 1,900 more spies. Using the Paris terror attacks to considerably bolster the UK state, the Special Air Service (SAS) forces unit of the British...
STRIKING South African parliamentary staff on Friday said they would no longer negotiate with the unpopular secretary of the legislature Gengezi Mgidlana and demanded he be removed from his position. The branch chairman of the National Education, Health and Allied Workers’ Union (NEHAWU), Sthembiso Tembe, accused Mgidlana of inflating his...
A JUDGE in Spain has issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and seven other former and current Israeli officials over a 2010 fatal raid by the Tel Aviv regime forces on a Gaza-bound aid ship. According to reports by Spanish media, the group could be arrested...
THE British state yesterday stepped up security measures in the wake of Friday night’s terror attacks in Paris. Cameron held a Cobra emergency committee meeting of ministers, intelligence and military chiefs on Saturday before leaving for the G20 summit in Turkey and home secretary May held another Cobra meeting yesterday. Before...