Monthly Archives: February 2016
OVER 1,750 support staff working in UK state-funded schools responded to a questionnaire stating that they are ‘overworked, underpaid and taken for granted’, the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) reports. Support staff are being expected to provide cover for classes and work longer hours, for little pay, according to...
HEALTH Secretary Hunt’s contract imposition has already begun to hit the rocks with 10 of the 20 NHS executives who signed the Dalton letter to him speaking out to say that they did not support contract imposition on the junior doctors! Dalton, Hunt’s negotiator, had claimed in his letter that...
42,728 evictions in 2015 are ‘clear proof of the devastating impact that welfare cuts and the chronic shortage of affordable homes are having on hundreds of renters every day,’ Campbell Robb, chief executive of the housing charity Shelter, said yesterday. He was speaking as figures released by the Ministry of...
‘JUNIOR doctors cannot and will not accept a contract that is bad for the future of patient care, the profession and the NHS as a whole,’ doctors’ union BMA said yesterday. They were responding to an announcement in parliament by health secretary Jeremy Hunt that the new contract would be...
‘JUNIOR doctors cannot and will not accept a contract that is bad for the future of patient care, the profession and the NHS as a whole,’ said the BMA yesterday, reacting to Health Secretary Hunt’s dictatorial imposition of the proposed new contract on the junior doctors and their BMA...
THE International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) is bringing a complaint against the Philippines over the murder of trade unionists. The ITF is joining forces with the National Confederation of Transport Workers’ Unions (NCTU) and the Centre of United and Progressive Workers (SENTRO) to bring a complaint against the government of...
THOUSANDS of junior doctors, NHS workers, trade unionists and supporters took to picket lines across the country yesterday, as the junior doctors took their second day of strike action. At 10am, student nurses walked out on strike in solidarity with the junior doctors and joined the pickets. Shaken by the overwhelming...
WHEN one of the biggest banks in the world is forced to publish an open letter to staff, investors and depositors that, contrary to all the evidence, the bank is in fact ‘absolutely rock solid’ and not in danger of imminent collapse, then wise people will start to look...
‘WE ARE not striking for cash, we are not striking for our personal careers, we are striking for the long-term sustainability of the NHS and for our patients,’ junior doctor Antonio de Marvao told News Line on the picket line outside Hammersmith Hospital in west London yesterday. Car horns blared...
TODAY’S strike by junior doctors must be supported by the entire trade union movement and the working class. What is at stake in this dispute is nothing less than the very existence of the NHS, a service that ranks as the greatest gain ever made by working people, a gain...
A HIGHER nurse-to-patient ratio is linked to a reduced risk of inpatient death, finds a study of staffing levels in NHS hospitals, published in the online journal BMJ Open. In trusts where registered (professionally trained) nurses had six or fewer patients to care for, the death rate was 20 per...
‘WE NEED other unions who are being attacked by this government to take action,’ BMA junior doctors committee member Aislinn Macklin-Doherty told News Line yesterday. Junior doctors will be joined on the picket lines by health workers, trade unionists and supporters outside hospitals up and down the country from...
DEPUTY Prime Minister, Foreign and Expatriates Minister Walid al-Moallem said Syria is ready to go for a Syrian-Syrian dialogue without any preconditions and will not comply with any precondition set by any party whatsoever. Speaking at a press conference on Saturday, al-Moallem said the delegation of the Syrian Arab Republic...
‘A SURGE in privatisation is threatening free NHS treatment,’ unions say. With contracts worth £5.5bn going to private firms, health sector unions warn of a slide to US-style system in which level of care depends on ability to pay. Trade unions representing half a million NHS workers have warned: ‘There is...
‘WE NEED a general strike before this government dismantles everything. The trade union movement must stand up as one. There is a breaking point for prison staff and it is coming,’ Joe Simpson assistant general secretary of the Prison Officers Association (POA) warned yesterday. Simpson was responding to an announcement...
BARTS Health NHS Trust, the biggest hospital trust in the country, will go £134.9 million in the red by the end of March according to figures released by the Tory health minster Alistair Burt. Barts, which comprises six hospitals including the large Whipps Cross in North East London, is not...
FOLLOWING Saturday’s brilliant march on Downing Street by more than 7,000 junior doctors (see pages 6 & 7), and ahead of Wednesday’s 24-hour strike, Tory Health Secretary Hunt rounded on their union, the BMA, yesterday morning. Blaming the BMA for junior doctors’ anger, Hunt repeated Tory claims that the new...
60,000 HOUSEHOLDS in England face being thrown out of their council houses next year as a result of the Tories ‘pay to stay’ policy. Under ‘pay to stay’, announced by Tory chancellor George Osborne in his 2015 budget, any family in council accommodation with a collective income of over £40,000...
TODAY thousands of junior doctors, health workers, student nurses, march through central London demanding ‘Victory to the junior doctors!’ At 8am next Wednesday morning (February 10) the junior doctors launch a 24-hour strike. They will be joined on their picket lines by masses of supporters. ‘All the unions should take action...
YESTERDAY, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention ruled that Julian Assange, the founder of the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks, has been unlawfully detained by Britain and Sweden since 2010. The ruling by this UN panel, which investigates and rules on international cases of arbitrary detention, went on to demand that...
THE Syrian opposition’s chief negotiator in peace talks in Geneva said on Wednesday he was ‘not optimistic’ about strained efforts to end the nearly five-year war ravaging his country. Mohammed Alloush, a leading member of the powerful Army of Islam rebel group, told journalists that those pressing to form a...
PROPPED up by out-of-state interests, extremists in West Virginia are pushing ‘right to work’ legislation that takes away rights from hardworking people trying to support their families. The AFL-CIO, the US trade union body, has published examples of out-of-state interests pushing this anti-working people legislation: • Last week, the unofficial leaders...
WESTERN leaders and their allies have opened a donor conference in London with an urgent plea for billions of pounds in aid for refugees from war-torn Syria. Germany pledged £1.7bn and the UK £1.2bn in extra aid for refugees. The goal of the donor conference is to raise £6.2bn ($9bn)...
THE biggest academy chain in England has been accused by Ofsted of ‘failing too many pupils’. Inspectors say that almost half of pupils at secondary schools run by the Academies Enterprise Trust (AET) are in schools that are ‘less than good’. Ofsted warns that poorer pupils do ‘particularly badly’ in...
1,300 IRISH bus drivers working for Bus Éireann have returned a massive 94% ‘YES’ vote for strike action to defend their pay and conditions, which the company are threatening to tear up. The National Bus and Railworkers Union (NBRU) said there was a 75% turnout in the strike vote. Bus...
HUGE PRESSURES are being put onto GPs in England and Wales. They are so great that doctors are beginning to feel that they are beginning to fail their patients. GP doctors’ leader Chaand Nagpaul said yesterday that the situation was now so bad that doctors were having to rush through...
PATIENT care is ‘deteriorating’ in half of GP practices as GP services buckle under rising workload, a new BMA survey warned yesterday. More than half of GP practices believe the quality of care they deliver is deteriorating because of rising workload according to a new BMA survey of almost 2,900...
LAST week, after the Court of Appeal ruled that the Bedroom Tax is discriminatory and unlawful, Paul Rutherford, one of the appellants, described himself as ‘mad angry’ when the government announced it intends to appeal against the judges’ ruling. Paul and Susan Rutherford care for their severely disabled grandson, Warren,...
JUNIOR doctors are to take strike action on February 10th after rejecting the government’s proposals in negotiations, where the government was represented by NHS Health Executive Sir David Dalton. He was parachuted into the talks by Health Secretary Hunt to push the government’s proposals through. He failed in this task....
RUSSIA’s Stalinist leadership is lining up at least seven state companies for privatisation because of the collapse of the oil market and oil prices and because of the impact of western sanctions. The potential sell-off is expected to raise in the region of 500 to 800bn roubles($6.5bn;...
‘EALING Hospital is the beating heart of the whole community, leave our hospital alone!’ local resident Prempal Dhaliwal said on the mass picket of the hospital last Friday. ‘Defend Ealing Hospital! Re-open Maternity!’ and ‘Victory to the junior doctors! Call a general strike!’ rang out on the megaphone as...
A REPORT by Manchester Metropolitan University’s Centre For Crime and Justice Studies published last week focuses on the way police and prosecutors collude to convict completely innocent youth, mainly from black and Asian communities, using the infamous ‘Joint Enterprise Law’. This law, which in essence is simply ‘guilt by association’,...
THE JUNIOR doctors strike, on Wednesday February 10th will go ahead, doctors union the BMA announced yesterday. The BMA said in a statement: ‘Despite the best efforts of our negotiating team, and hours of talks facilitated by ACAS, we have not managed to reach agreement with NHS Employers and the...
LABOUR and the RCN have reacted angrily to instruction from NHS bosses and regulators to impose a ‘headcount reduction’ to reduce their deficits for 2015-2016. The order is contained in a letter Monitor and the NHS Trust Development Authority (TDA) sent on 15th January to every one of the...
VERY ANGRY BMA GPs met in conference on Saturday where they carried motions to fight ‘underfunding’ and a rapidly growing workload that ‘threatened NHS safety’, while Motion 20 said that ‘the GPC should canvass GPs on their willingness to submit undated resignations’. Many delegates complained about the watered...
ANGRY GPs on Saturday voted for action over underfunding and a workload that threatens patient safety and their own health. But at the start of a special conference over 350 delegates in London, called by the British Medical Association (BMA) GPs Committee (GPC), conference chair Guy Watkins warned: ‘GPs can’t...