Monthly Archives: December 2015
ALMOST two thirds of GPs want the BMA to ballot the profession over industrial action, a GPonline survey has revealed, as the BMA’s Local Medical Committees (LMCs) prepare an emergency conference next month. In an exclusive GPonline survey by Pulse magazine of more than 650 GPs, more than 40% said...
THE government is planning to end the right of council tenants to stay in their homes for life. An amendment to the Housing Bill, currently going through Parliament, will limit occupation rights for new tenancies to five years at the most. If the amendment is passed into law, councils...
CAPITALISM’S latest scheme to save failed banks claimed the life of an Italian pensioner who lost his £72,000 life savings following the collapse of Banca Etruria last month. The pensioner, who hanged himself, left a suicide note placing responsibility for his death at the door of the bank and the...
THE United States government and tobacco companies are failing to protect teenage children from hazardous work in tobacco farming, says a new report by Human Rights Watch. The 72-page report US: Tobacco Farms No Place for Teens documents the harm caused to 16- and 17-year-olds who work long hours as...
THE government has rejected calls to release confidential files relating to the Shrewsbury 24, who were charged with various offences after the first national building workers’ strike in 1972. MPs voted ‘overwhelmingly’ for the release of government documents related to the case to be released in January 2014. But on...
THE NHS in England will struggle this winter without more beds in care homes and other community settings to ease hospital pressures, Nuffield Trust researchers warn in a report published yesterday. On Wednesday, councils and care providers warned that government funding cuts are causing a serious crisis threatening the existence...
THE ruling class state machinations that secured the jailing of a number of Shrewsbury pickets after the first national building workers strike in 1972 is to remain a secret of the ruling class state apparatus. This was made clear by Home Office Minister Penning on Wednesday as the issue...
MONDAY night’s Channel 4 Dispatches programme claimed the Next shopping chain has slashed £2.5m off its wage bill by employing hundreds of low-earning apprentices, while giving them inadequate training in return. The pay rate in 2015 for apprentices aged 16-18 is £3.30. The programme, called Low Pay Britain, investigated whether...
A LETTER to Chancellor Osborne and Health Secretary Hunt signed by the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services, the Care Provider Alliance, which represents agencies providing care, and the NHS Confederation says that vital care services for older and disabled people in England are at risk. These leading care...
AN RMT demonstration outside Clapham Common underground station yesterday called for the dropping of disciplinary charges against RMT member Glen Hart. Speaking to News Line yesterday, Glen Hart said: ‘We had a good turnout today. It shows the effect and benefits of being in the union. That’s why we took...
NURSING homes will close and support for elderly and disabled people will be withdrawn due to the massive social care funding crisis, leaders in the sector warned in a letter to Chancellor Osborne and Health Secretary Hunt yesterday. Osborne announced in his spending review last month that his new funding...
US Secretary of State John Kerry has called talks on Syria in New York for December 18-19. Kerry said that the United States and its allies are trying to facilitate a transition toward a unified Syria under UN supervision. He condemned Russia for supporting the Syrian president, Assad, and insisted...
‘ALL ACADEMIES must be handed back to local council control’, Hank Roberts past national president of ATL said yesterday. He was speaking after Tory Education Minister Nicky Morgan’s announcement that ‘failing’ academies will face being taken over by another academy chain. Roberts added: ‘Failing academies get passed on to academy...
‘NO ONE should have to experience the conditions that the refugees are living in,’ civil servants union PCS member Wayne Harrison said yesterday after returning from a refugee camp in Calais. Harrison, a pension administrator for MyCSP in Liverpool, recently travelled to Calais with his vehicle packed full of supplies...
FIRE and rescue services currently responding to the floods in northern England are hampered by the unprecedented cuts they have suffered over the past five years, said the Fire Brigades Union yesterday. The body of an elderly man was found in the River Kent near Kendal yesterday, while over...
US FIGHTER planes attacked a Syrian Army post on Sunday evening, killing three Syrian soldiers and wounding 13 others in what has been condemned by the Syrian government as a ‘heinous act of aggression’. The Syrian Foreign Ministry said that four coalition aircraft launched nine missiles at the Syrian Army post in Deir...
THE Engineering Employers Federation (EEF), the body that represents the manufacturing industry in Britain, has produced its latest forecast which spells out how the country’s manufacturing sector is in complete meltdown in the face of the ‘gathering gloom’ for the world capitalist economy. According to the EEF, the cause of...
UNITED AUTOWORKERS (UAW) officials on Saturday applauded workers’ ‘courage and persistence’ after a vote on union recognition at VW’s Chattanooga plant and urged Volkswagen to respect the decision. Skilled trades employees at Volkswagen’s Chattanooga plant have voted overwhelmingly to designate UAW Local 42 as their representative for the...
THE Russian Deputy Defence Minister Anatoly Antonov has given a briefing called ‘Russian Federation Armed Forces fighting against international terrorist. New data’. He said: ‘International terrorism is the world’s biggest threat today. It is not an imaginary threat. It is very real, and many countries, particularly Russia, have first...
DOCUMENTS kept secret by the Cabinet Office that implicate former prime minister Edward Heath in a concerted attempt to influence the jury in the prosecutions of trade unionists involved in the 1972 national construction workers strike are set to be revealed to parliament this week. The Shrewsbury 24 Campaign says...
THE Oldham by-election did not go according to the ruling class-Tory script. There was no collapse in the Labour vote. Corbyn was not sacked as its immediate outcome, and the new leader in waiting, one Hilary Benn, neatly nominated by the Tory cheers at his 100% pro-imperialist speech, winding...
THE ‘deeply flawed’ decision to downgrade North West London hospitals must be halted, according to a report by Michael Mansfield QC. It warns that the closures threaten ‘the fundamental principles of a universal NHS’. The Independent Healthcare Commission for North West London, led by Mansfield, found that the ‘Shaping a...
PARTY leader Jeremy Corbyn has said Labour’s win in the Oldham West and Royton by-election shows its ‘strength and the appeal of its anti-austerity message’. The result is a blow to the Labour right wing and media who had been calling for his head after Wednesday’s Syria war vote. Visiting...
THE disarray and panic that is a permanent state for the central banks of Europe and America was on open display yesterday. In the US, the head of the Fed, Janet Yelland, told Congress that they would almost certainly be raising interest rates when the Fed meets on December 16....
THE PRIVATE company UnitingCare has collapsed after only eight months and pulled out of running care for the elderly in Cambridgeshire. The company won an £800 million-a-year, 5-year contract but has been forced to pull out stating that the service was not ‘financially sustainable’. Older people’s services in Cambridgeshire have...
MPs on Wednesday overwhelmingly backed UK air strikes against the Islamic State in Syria, by 397 votes to 223, with a total of 66 Labour MPs siding with the government, while seven Tories defied their party whip and voted against the military adventure. The Labour right wing was led by...
ISRAELI armed forces on Wednesday imposed a curfew on Jerusalem’s Shuafat Refugee Camp after cordoning off the area, in an apparent prelude to punitively demolish the family homes of a number of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces. Since early October 2015, Israel has intensified its security procedures across the West...
EVERY 90 seconds a renter in England is put at risk of losing their home, warns Shelter. Research by the housing and homelessness charity has revealed that over 149,000 renting households were put at risk of eviction in the last year – equivalent to approximately one renter every minute and...
THE United States is poised to step up the war in Iraq and Syria with the sending of more US ground forces. Speaking to the House Armed Services Committee, US Defence Secretary Ashton Carter said on Tuesday that special operations troops are to be sent to battle Islamic State...
The International and European Federations of Journalists (IFJ and EFJ) call on the Turkish authorities to immediately release journalists Can Dündar and Erdem Gül and to drop all charges against them. The two reporters working for the daily newspaper Cumhuriyet were arrested last week in Istanbul following a judicial complaint...
PRIME minister Cameron repeatedly refused to apologise, as he opened the debate on bombing Syria, for calling Labour MPs who oppose the bombing ‘a bunch of terrorist sympathisers’. He refused to apologise over a dozen times. The Motion that he moved was: ‘That this House … Supports Her Majesty’s Government...
‘DON’T cut bursaries!’ and ‘Jeremy Hunt, Shame on You!’ shouted a crowd of around 500 student nurses and supporters, both Unison and RCN members, at a lobby of the Department of Health HQ, Richmond House, in Whitehall yesterday. Chancellor Osborne announced in his Autumn Statement that in future nurses will...
‘AN ALARMING teacher recruitment crisis is gripping England’s schools,’ teachers union NUT warned yesterday, adding that ‘no amount of “golden handshakes” will resolve the problem’. The NUT was responding to the annual Ofsted report into schools which describes the intense crisis facing both secondary schools and colleges under the Tory...
SOUTH Korea’s umbrella labour unions are defying a government ban and have pledged to push ahead with organising another massive rally on December 5th, projecting that hundreds of thousands of protesters nationwide will convene in Seoul for the anti-government movement. The upcoming demonstration, which follows a mass rally on November...
THE eleventh hour climbdown by Tory health minister Jeremy Hunt over imposing new contracts on junior doctors has wounded him and exposed the weakness of a Tory government when confronted by a section of workers who refuse to back down from a fight. Late on Monday talks at the conciliation...
A STUDY published this week in the British Journal of General Practice shines a searchlight on one of the main causes of ‘health inequality’ in Britain. Research carried out by Glasgow and Dundee universities into the working of GP funding formulas, which allocate to GP practices the amount they receive...
ISRAELI forces shot dead a Palestinian man on Sunday after he allegedly stabbed and injured an Israeli police officer near Damascus Gate in occupied East Jerusalem, an Israeli police spokesperson said. Micky Rosenfeld said the alleged attacker was a 38-year-old Palestinian from Nablus district in the northern occupied West Bank....
LABOUR leader Jeremy Corbyn announced yesterday that he will give Labour MPs a ‘free vote’ on the crucial issue of whether the UK joins the bombing of Syria. This completely rejects the position of the majority of Labour Party members and large numbers of the population who are opposed to...
AT THE eleventh hour, talks between the BMA on behalf of the junior doctors and the government at ACAS reached the following decision: ‘Following talks under the auspices of ACAS, the BMA, NHS Employers and the Department of Health are all agreed that a return to direct and meaningful negotiations...