Monthly Archives: April 2016
‘CHILDREN’S lives are in danger!’ Surinder Grewal warned on the mass picket of Ealing Hospital in west London yesterday to stop the closure of the Charlie Chaplin Children’s Ward. She was speaking at the 50-strong West London Council of Action picket which won big support from junior doctors, nurses, patients...
THE Editorial Board of the News Line sends its revolutionary greetings on May Day 2016 to the workers and the oppressed people of the world fighting capitalism and imperialism. Across the globe, millions of workers are fighting back against attempts by the world’s capitalists to impose the full burden of...
‘TODAY we honour Nelson Mandela and share the joy of our sisters and brothers in South Africa,’ Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah said in celebration of Freedom Day on Tuesday. Hamdallah and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas inaugurated a statue of Nelson Mandela in the central occupied West Bank city of...
YOU can tell that the split and divided Tory party and capitalist class in the UK are in very serious trouble when they have had to begin a campaign that the Labour Party leadership is covering up for anti-semitic racists and that the Labour Party is in fact a...
THE NEW contract being imposed by the Tory health secretary Jeremy Hunt on junior doctors is ‘potentially illegal’, an equal rights watchdog reported yesterday. The campaign against the imposition of the new contract which junior doctors rightly insist is ‘unfair and unsafe’ led to the first-ever full walk-out of junior...
‘VICTORY to the junior doctors – kick the Tories out! TUC get off your knees – call a general strike! No privatisation – defend the NHS!’ shouted youth and workers at yesterday’s Young Socialists-led lobby of the TUC. The 100-strong lobby was demanding yesterday’s meeting of the TUC General Council...
THE latest two-day strike action of the junior doctors has been a resounding success with massive picket lines, and huge public support, while the established senior consultants have given emergency cover that ensured that there was no state of emergency in the NHS, which the likes of Hunt had...
‘SAVE our NHS! Jeremy Hunt doesn’t care! Doctors and teachers unite and fight!’ shouted junior doctors, teachers and their supporters on a 10,000-strong march from St Thomas’ Hospital, Westminster to a rally opposite Downing Street on Tuesday night. The demonstration was organised by the BMA and the London Region National...
102 CONSULTANTS have written an open letter to Bruce Keogh, Medical Director of NHS England, in support of the junior doctors. It reads: ‘OPEN letter from 102 consultants to Sir Bruce Keogh. Dear Sir Bruce, Re: Proposed junior doctors contract changes. We, the under-signed, wish to express our total support for our...
THERE is not the slightest doubt that the Tories, headed by Cameron, Osborne and Hunt, have picked their quarrel with the junior doctors. It is not just that they want to privatise the NHS, they also want to make an example of what happens to any group of workers, or...
THE TUC must organise a national day of action in support of the junior doctors’ dispute and our NHS, the Public and Commercial Services union said yesterday. The union’s general secretary Mark Serwotka wrote to the TUC yesterday afternoon to ask that the proposal is discussed at this morning’s ...
IT’S a shame that the All in a Day’s Work book of interviews, recording lives and the struggles of west London workers from 1945-1995, did not reach the heroic and victorious, five-year Hillingdon Hospital Strike. This began on October 1st, 1995 when 56 domestic and catering workers were sacked by...
THE lobby of the TUC general council meeting tomorrow is crucial for the fight, not just in defence of the junior doctors, but to force the trade union leadership to take up arms in the defence of the NHS. Over the weekend the Tories made it absolutely clear that they...
THIS MORNING for the first time in history, junior doctors launch their full walk-out, taking the government head on. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn responded yesterday to the government’s accusation that the junior doctors’ strike was a ‘political’ strike to ‘bring down the government’ by saying ‘Back off! and support the...
All in a Day’s Work Working Lives and Trade Unions in West London 1945-1995 Published by the Britain at Work Project £12.80 with p&p ALL in a Day’s Work is a 250-page book featuring over one hundred extracts from oral history interviews carried out by the Britain at Work London group. It chronicles...
MORE than 2,500 consultants, GPs and senior doctors have delivered a letter to Downing Street saying this week’s all-out strike by junior doctors will not put patients at risk as they will cover for their junior doctor colleagues. In the letter addressed to prime minister Cameron and health secretary Hunt,...
THE UK could take up to 10 years to negotiate trade deals with the US if it leaves the EU, Barack Obama has said. In a BBC interview on Sunday, the outgoing US president said: ‘It could be five years from now, 10 years from now before we were able...
US President, Barak Obama, has issued his ultimatum to the British ruling class – stay in the EU or else! In a lengthy article in yesterday’s Telegraph newspaper, Obama invoked World War II as justification for his unprecedented intervention in the domestic politics of the UK, claiming that Britain and...
NATO and Russia held ‘frank and serious’ talks despite ‘profound disagreements’ as their ambassadors met on Wednesday for the first time since 2014, alliance chief Jens Stoltenberg said. He added: ‘There were profound disagreements related to the crisis with Ukraine.’ Relations have worsened over Russia’s air campaign in Syria and tensions...
BOMBARDIER has upped its jobs massacre programme in Belfast, with an even greater number of sackings to take place this year. The aerospace company said in February that it was axing 1,080 posts over two years, about 20% of its Northern Ireland workforce. But now it says 630 will go...
GREEK journalists employed in newspapers are on a national 48-hour strike this Thursday and Friday, while journalists on radio and television are staging their 49-hour national strike on Friday and Saturday. The action has been called by the Greek Federation of Journalists’ Trade Unions against the government’s Pensions Bill which...
DAVID Cameron is misleading parents and the public on school funding, says the National Union of Teachers (NUT). Commenting on Cameron’s statement on school funding during Prime Minister’s questions on Wednesday, NUT deputy general secretary Kevin Courtney said: ‘David Cameron at PMQs today said that he was protecting pupil funding. ‘This...
Four years after the tortured, lifeless body of Bangladesh garment worker – organiser Aminul Islam – was discovered in a ditch, his killers have yet to be arrested. The Bangladesh Garment and Industrial Workers Federation (BGIWF) and Bangladesh Centre for Workers Solidarity (BCWS) demanded on the anniversary last Friday that...
THE British Medical Association (BMA) on Tuesday wrote a letter to Health Secretary Hunt making a ‘clear offer’ to cancel the junior doctors’ strike action on the 26th and 27th April. Dr Johann Malawana, the Chair, of the BMA junior doctors’ committee wrote: ‘With a week to go...
‘WE have a duty to stand up for our junior doctors. We cannot allow them to be bullied in such a way,’ Ian Hodson, President of the Bakers Union said yesterday. PCS General Secretary Mark Serwotka said: ‘We fully support the doctors’ strike and the teachers who are campaigning alongside...
MEDECINS Sans Frontieres (MSF – Doctors Without Borders) has ‘strongly condemned’ the UK plan to use gunboats to force would-be refugees back to Libya. Last Monday MSF director in the UK, Vickie Hawkins, made the following statement: ‘The European agreement due to be announced today to forcibly expel refugees and...
THE imperialist war drums are beating with a vengeance as advanced preparations for a direct military intervention into Libya by Britain, Italy, France and the US emerge into the light of day. Over the weekend, the Tory foreign secretary, Philip Hammond, made an unannounced visit to Libya pledging money and...
THE BMA wrote to Tory health secretary Hunt yesterday with a clear offer: lift the imposition of the new contract and junior doctors will call off next week’s industrial action. Hunt responded by slapping down the offer and insisting that the contract will still be imposed, leaving the junior doctors...
SYRIANS on Sunday commemorated the 70th anniversary of Evacuation Day on Sunday (Syrian Independence Day, which marks the evacuation of French occupation forces from the country in 1946). Syrians recalled the sublime meanings and indications underpinning the concept of independence in terms of defending the homeland and preserving its sovereignty...
THE right-wing, free market think tank, the Adam Smith Institute, yesterday hit out at the Tories’ ‘deeply immoral’ failure to bring down the national debt by imposing austerity cuts vastly exceeding anything the government has proposed so far. According to its report, the official national debt, which stands in the...
PM Cameron earlier last week insisted he would remain Prime Minister even if he lost the June 23 referendum. This position has been challenged in no uncertain way by ex-Tory Chancellor and Home Secretary Kenneth Clarke. He told BBC Radio 4’s Week In Westminster: ‘The Prime Minister wouldn’t last 30...
‘THE government plans the biggest real-term cuts in school funding since at least the late 1970s,’ warns the National Union of Teachers. The NUT has submitted its response to the first stage of government consultation on the imposition of a national funding formula for schools and other changes to the...
‘THE incarceration and torture of political prisoners is an outright breach of International Humanitarian Law,’ says Palestinian ambassador to the UK, Manuel Hassassian. ‘Israel acts with impunity and acts above the law supported by so called western democracies. This charade should stop once and for all,’ he demanded. This...
BARE necessities are missing for visual effects (VFX) workers at MPC, says BECTU. ‘The Moving Picture Company appears to encapsulate everything that is wrong with employment in UK VFX in microcosm,’ says the media and entertainment union. In a large-scale survey of people who have worked at London’s Moving Picture...
CORBYN has been transformed into his opposite as far as the ruling class and Labour’s rabid Blairite right wing is concerned. He has gone from a villain or buffoon, into a hero and just the man for the EU job. The saga began when as the accidental, unexpectedly elected left...
CHILDREN are starting school underweight, hungry and anaemic, a committee of MPs warned yesterday, and teachers’ union NUT blamed Tory cuts as responsible for this ‘shameful situation’. The All-Party Parliamentary Group on Hunger have produced a shocking new report entitled ‘Britain’s not-so-hidden hunger’. Christine Blower, General Secretary of the National...
THE People’s Assembly elections for selecting 250 members from over 3,500 candidates from across all Syrian provinces began at 7am on Wednesday April 13th, with voters beginning to arrive at the voting centres early in the morning. Voting centres, which number over 7,300, opened their doors to voters at 7am...
AS the April 26th-27th strike action of the junior doctors approaches, the chorus of reproaches from the likes of Dame Sally Davies, Sir Bruce Keogh, the boss of NHS England, and Mac Armstrong, a former secretary of the BMA grow louder. Davies, Britain’s Chief Medical Officer, said: ‘I urge every...