Monthly Archives: May 2016
BMA Junior Doctors’ Committee Chair Dr Johann Malawana admitted on Saturday that despite gigantic efforts to find ‘common ground,’ no agreement could be reached to end the imposition of an unsafe and unfair contract. Malawana admitted in his opening speech to Saturday’s junior doctors conference in London that no ‘deal’...
‘PAY all at least he London Living Wage! No sackings! No cuts to hours! Affordable cinema tickets for working class families! Save our community cinema!’ These are the demands of cinema workers at the Rio in Dalston, Hackney, east London. They are on strike on Wednesday 25 May....
AN academy chain in London set up by the Tory schools minister Lord Nash is having its education curriculum drawn up by his daughter. The chain of four schools is run by ‘Future Academies’, set up and run by Lord Nash and includes the Pimlico Academy. Jo Nash, who has...
TODAY junior doctors meet at their conference in central London to decide the next step in their battle against Tory health secretary Hunt’s imposed contract, which doctors rightly say is unfair, unsafe and illegal. On the eve of the conference, junior doctors spoke to News Line about this crucial point...
THE Howard League for Penal Reform yesterday responded to a written statement by the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, Michael Gove, about Medway Secure Training Centre in Kent. It coincides with the publication of a report by an independent improvement board, which was set up in January...
TEACHERS’ unions united together this week in condemning the Tory SATs tests ‘debacle’, vividly reporting the harm they are doing to children and insisting that they must be scrapped altogether. ATL General Secretary Mary Bousted said on Wednesday: ‘I’ve heard it all now: Nick Gibb (Tory Schools Minister) has claimed...
AS the worldwide crisis of capitalism deepens, the war preparations of the US and the NATO powers are becoming more frantic, with plans to construct missile bases along Eastern Europe’s borders with Russia, starting with Poland and Romania. The US is activating a land-based ‘missile defence station’ in Romania,...
THE BMA doctors’ union and the RCN nurses’ union joined hands in denouncing the Tory government’s onslaught on the NHS yesterday, after the publication of a scathing report from the Public Accounts Committee. The report accused the government of having made ‘no coherent attempt’ to assess the workforce implications...
ISRAELI forces detained early on Tuesday 10 more Palestinians, including four minors, from a number of West Bank districts, said Palestine Prisoners’ Society. Forces detained four Palestinians from the central West Bank district of Ramallah, including three minors from Deir Abu Masal village, northwest of Ramallah. The detainees were identified...
THE French Socialist government’s cabinet has opted for a dictatorship over the working class by agreeing to force through its anti-trade union legislation, invoking a little-used Article (49.3) in the constitution to enable Prime Minister Manuel Valls to by-pass parliament. This dictatorial decision was taken after a number of MPs...
UK military personel carrying out drone strikes ‘could be vulnerable to a charge of murder,’ Labour MP Harriet Harman said yesterday. Harman chairs the cross-party Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights who published a report yesterday examining the legality of UK drone strikes. Two UK citizens were killed in Syria last...
ON Monday Tory PM Cameron warned that if the UK leaves the EU it could trigger off another great European war. What a condemnation of European capitalism, and what a strange depiction of bloodsoaked UK capitalism as a peacemaker! His Tory rival and leader of the ‘Leave’ campaign, Boris Johnson,...
OVER 30,000 workers, unemployed, youth and students, lawyers, small shop keepers and poor farmers filled up the large square in front of the Vouli (Greek parliament) building in Athens on Sunday evening in a militant and angry protest against the government’s Pensions and Tax Bill. The GSEE (Greek TUC) and...
ISRAELI forces on Sunday morning opened fire on Palestinian farmers in southern Gaza Strip, local officials said yesterday. Local residents added that Israeli forces deployed east of Khan Yunis opened fire on farmers, preventing them from reaching their lands. An Israeli army spokesperson said they could not confirm the...
JUST over a month ago, Tory prime minister David Cameron announced that hundreds of extra armed police would be sent around the country to ‘deal with a Paris-style terrorist attack’. 400 more armed police, Cameron promised, would be deployed in cities outside London on a round-the-clock basis along with a...
A TWO day nationwide strike of lecturers at every university in the country has been called in an escalating row over pay, the University and College Union (UCU) confirmed yesterday. UCU members in higher education will walk out on Wednesday May 25th and Thursday May 26th. They have been offered...
FIERCE battles took place outside the Greek parliament building (the Vouli) on Sunday night as riot police attacked the 30,000 youth, workers and poor farmers protesting against savage cuts to pensions. Outraged lawyers and farmers pushed right in front of the Vouli’s unknown soldier monument shouting with their loud hailers...
‘THIS is a huge government climb-down and is a testament to the campaigning of teachers and parents,’ Kevin Courtney, Deputy General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said on Friday. Welcoming the announcement that the forced academisation plans are now being dropped by the government, he continued: ‘Within a...
WORKERS in Greece staged a militant two-day general strike last Friday and Saturday against the government’s Pensions and Tax Reforms Bill that crushes the state pensions system, cuts wages yet again and imposes huge tax hikes including a 24% VAT on basic goods. The vote on the Bill was due...
IT says something about the scale of the defeat that the Tories and the bosses have suffered over the Mayoral election in London and the council elections as a whole, when the result of the Mayoral election in London and Sadiq Khan’s great victory was not even front...
UNIVERSAL Credit is a ‘ticking time bomb’ for many low-paid working families, shop workers union Usdaw warned. Last Tuesday, the full roll-out of Universal Credit began. Universal Credit is now being pushed at every job centre in the UK for all single people. Universal Credit rolls six benefits into one:...
IN an overwhelming victory for Labour, Sadiq Khan has become the new mayor of London yesterday. Londoners were glad to see the back of Boris Johnson who, in his eight years of being mayor has forced the closure of ten fire stations across the capital, the destruction of council housing,...
THE Junior Doctors Committee of the BMA is meeting this Saturday to respond to Tory Health minister, Hunt, who has been forced to agree to a five-day truce and for talks on the new contract. The offer, first proposed by the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges and then accepted by...
THE TORY government has been forced to make a fundamental retreat: their plans to force all of England’s schools to become academies have been abandoned. The government’s plans have been defeated after head teachers and teachers threatened strike action. Teachers, head teachers, education experts and both Labour and Tory MPs...
THE proposal, made by 22 medical colleges and faculties for a five-day pause in the drive to impose new junior doctors’ contracts in England, in return for which the British Medical Association would suspend for five days any plans for new strike actions to allow talks, was initially slapped...
MORE than half (52%) of school support staff across the UK have experienced stress, anxiety or depression as they struggle to cope with their workloads, according to a new survey published by Unison this week. Two-fifths (41.5%) of those who took part in the survey said they had difficulty in...
PULITZER Prize-winning novelist, prominent Jewish-American author Michael Chabon says the Israeli oppression of Palestinians is worse than the apartheid system in South Africa. Chabon accompanied other American authors in a trip to Israel last month, and expressed shock over the plight of Palestinians, describing the Israeli occupation as the most...
US Secretary of State John Kerry has warned Syrian President Bashar al-Assad that seeking military gains will not end the ‘civil war’. He added there would be ‘repercussions’ if the Syrian government flouted a cessation of violence agreed in February. Speaking in Washington, Kerry said he was hopeful the cessation...
THE police watchdog is considering releasing an unredacted version of its review of South Yorkshire Police’s handling of events at the Battle of Orgreave in 1984. The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) said it was examining whether there were any remaining legal issues preventing its publication. Thousands of striking miners...
GOOGLE has been given the confidential records including full names and patient histories of an estimated 1.6 million NHS patients in a data-sharing agreement. Under it, Google’s artificial intelligence division ‘DeepMind’ has access to all data of patients attending the Royal Free, Barnet and Chase Farm hospitals in London over...
CRUCIAL parts of an inquiry into undercover police spies who spent years embedded in political movements are to be heard in secret in order to protect the state, it emerged yesterday. ‘It seems they spy on anybody who is challenging the status quo or capitalism,’ victim of police infiltration Helen...
BMA chair Dr Mark Porter told the union’s Special Representative Meeting yesterday that ‘Twenty-four years ago, it was the first reforms that established an internal market. ‘We still live in the shadow of those decisions. The care we can offer our patients is restricted by them. The mess we are...
THE Pitchford Inquiry into police undercover operations directed against various protest movements – trades unions, political movements and MPs – is to be gagged on behalf of the government and the capitalist state after police demands that crucial parts of it be heard in private. What has emerged is that...
THE Egyptian government should legalise independent trade unions, Human Rights Watch said last Sunday, May 1st, International Workers’ Day. What has emerged is that police officers were organised to join different protest groups, to take leading roles in them, urging fellow members of those groups to take illegal actions, and,...
MAY DAY in France erupted into state-organised violence when riot police attacked workers and youth in what was a blatant attempt to crack down on the massive wave of protests against the new anti-labour legislation being debated in the French parliament today. The 70,000 strong demonstration in Paris was progressing...
WORKERS and youth on the 10,000-strong May Day march in London on Sunday expressed their determination to defend the NHS and the Welfare State. Many voiced their opposition to the EU dictatorship, austerity and its privatisation drive. Typical was John Hamilton of Lewisham People Before Profit who was stringing up...
‘JEREMY Hunt. How dare you!’ wrote Julie Lovell, a woman whose 33-year-old daughter Karen, died after the end of the two-day junior doctor strike. Her daughter’s death, she makes absolutely clear, was not in any way due to the strike. In a facebook post she slams the Tory health secretary...
A MASS ‘kids strike’ takes place today as the hated SATs exams are boycotted by more than 30,000 parents and their children. Parents are taking their children out of school today because they have had enough of the continuous testing and re-testing of their children. The system has...
THE attempt to frame up Ken Livingstone as a rabid racist, after similar attempts to do the same to Labour leader Corbyn, who was depicted as being practically a member of Hezbollah and/or Hamas, and then to the Labour candidate for the post of London Lord Mayor, Sadiq Khan...
OVER 10,000 trade unionists and youth took part in the London May Day march yesterday from Clerkenwell Green to Trafalgar Square. As well as trade union banners there were banners and delegations of Kurds, Iraqis, Iranians and Sri Lankans living in the UK. A lively Young Socialists and Workers Revolutionary...
PLO Secretary General Saeb Erekat slammed Israel’s official rejection of the upcoming French initiative as a ‘reaffirmation of the Israeli government’s decision to continue its crimes and violations’, in a press release published Thursday evening. Earlier on Thursday, a statement from the office of the Prime Minister of Israel rejected...