Monthly Archives: June 2016
YESTERDAY, under orders from Tory leader Cameron, most of the King’s horses and most of the King’s men of the major trade trade unions and the Labour Party gathered to make a desperate effort to save the hated Cameron government from a catastrophic defeat at the hands of the...
AS SOON as the 2016 bargaining negotiation began, it became clear that the National Union of Metalworkers SA (NUMSA) had been proved right to predict fierce battles between workers and employers this year, said Irvin Jim, NUMSA General Secretary, in a progress statement. The statement reads: ‘Ahead of the 2017...
‘OUR union has just reiterated its stance and that is that it is to vote to leave the EU,’ Ronnie Draper, General Secretary of BFAWU (Bakers Food and Allied Workers Union), said yesterday. ‘It happened on Sunday. It was a fabulous debate at our annual conference held in Southport last...
ON 18th May the doctors union, the BMA, announced that it had agreed a new contract for junior doctors. The BMA had completed eight days of secret talks at ACAS (The Advisory Conciliation and Arbitration Service) with the government and NHS Employers. Brendan Barber, former secretary of the TUC and...
FOUR-and-a-half-million people in England and Wales are in insecure work, reveals new analysis by Citizens Advice. The national charity says insecure work – where people don’t have regular hours or predictable shifts – means many find it impossible to manage their budgets or plan for the future. The new figures...
SO dire is the Tory crisis over the EU referendum that Cameron and pro-EU Tories have been forced to ‘step-back’ from the leadership of the ‘Remain’ campaign. Cameron knows that the Tory government is hated by workers because of the austerity measures that Tory rule has brought to Britain....
ISRAELI authorities implemented a large-scale closure on the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip on Friday, adding to a long line of punitive measures that have been carried out since last Wednesday’s deadly attack in Tel Aviv. An Israeli army spokesperson said that all passages to the West Bank and...
THE UK Prime Minister, Cameron, has delivered a thinly disguised deadly threat to the UK working class. This is that if it has the audacity to vote to quit the EU, then the Tories will scrap all of their election pledges relating to jobs, wages, pensions and the NHS...
GEORGE Soros, the multi-billionaire ‘vulture’ investor who makes his fortune betting on capitalism’s crisis and who is credited with breaking the pound in the 1990s, is today jumping ship and piling his billions into the safe haven of gold. In 1992, Soros achieved the status as supreme currency speculator when...
AN INVESTIGATION is being launched which will examine the activities of an MI5 agent known as ‘Stakeknife’ who has been linked to 50 murders during the war against Sinn Fein in the north of Ireland. The investigation will be led by the chief constable of Bedfordshire Police. The chief constable...
THREE thousand hospital workers, Metro workers, primary school teachers and pensioners marched through Greece’s capital, Athens last Wednesday. The day of strike action was against the policies of privatisation, ‘flexible’ working conditions and cuts in hospital spending by the Greek government of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras. In the port of Piraeus...
FIREFIGHTERS and the general public are outraged as Essex fire authority has voted through the biggest cuts in the county’s history, which will see as many as 130 firefighters’ jobs axed, putting people’s lives into serious jeopardy. The news confirms fears that the people of Essex will have to wait...
BY ALEX MITCHELL GRAPHIC designer, photographer, collector and writer David King dedicated most of his adult life to celebrating the Russian Revolution of 1917. He produced books, curated exhibitions and organised seminars to present the Bolshevik-led revolution with primary-sourced accuracy and captivating images. While bourgeois art moved inexorably towards commercialism, the cult...
ISRAEL’S Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Uri Ariel speaking in Moscow, where he travelled with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Wednesday, has said that Israel must go ahead with its plan to annex more than half of the occupied West Bank after evicting ten of thousands of...
‘WHEN bus services are axed, it isolates communities,’ Unison warned in launching a new campaign to save local bus services. ‘We are living in isolation!’ Michelle Wilkes exclaimed, describing the impact of bus service cuts on her community near Shropshire. The Monday-to-Saturday bus service which served my village has...
THE ex-chief executive of British Home Stores (BHS), Darren Topp, told a parliamentary committee yesterday morning that the former owner of BHS, Dominic Chappell, whom he described as an ex-SAS reservist who bought BHS for £1 from Sir Phillip Green, had threatened to kill him. Topp alleged that Chappell threatened...
FORMER owner of BHS Dominic Chappell was accused yesterday of being ‘a liar’ with his ‘fingers in the till’ who ‘threatened to kill’ the company’s ex-Chief Executive. The House of Commons Business, Innovation and Skills Committee and the Work and Pensions Committee were jointly hearing evidence into the collapse of...
SPORTS Direct boss Mike Ashley admitted, during a grilling by a committee of MPs yesterday, that he was effectively paying warehouse workers less than the minimum wage, which is illegal in the UK. The billionaire finally agreed to appear before the Business, Innovation and Skills select committee after months of...
THE Blacklist Support Group has revealed photographic evidence of undercover police spying on the RMT rail union. Photographic evidence shows that in October 2004 a spy cop was present at the industrial dispute following the sacking of the prominent union activist Steve Hedley (now elected as Senior Assistant General Secretary...
THE war preparations by the imperialist nations against Russia took a giant leap forward this week with NATO and non-NATO troops massed in north-western Poland for what is the biggest ‘war game’ in Eastern Europe in decades. 31,000 troops drawn from 24 countries are engaged in a 10-day military exercise,...
PALESTINIANS in the Gaza Strip commemorated on Sunday the anniversary of the 1967 Israeli invasion and occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai, and the Golan Heights that began on June 5, a day that Palestinians refer to as the Naksa, meaning setback. Demonstrators at the Naksa Day rally waved...
UK Special Forces have been fighting on the frontline in Syria despite explicit assurances to parliament from Cameron that there would be ‘no UK boots on the ground’. Such a move ‘is illegal unless sanctioned by parliament,’ Stop the War Coalition warned yesterday. According to The Times British special...
A REPORT by an official UN agency has confirmed what every worker across Europe knows – namely that the savage austerity measures carried out across the EU by governments determined to rescue a bankrupt capitalist system has driven an estimated seven million more people into poverty over the past...
‘BURSARIES or bust! Jeremy bite the dust!’ chanted over a thousand student nurses as they marched to Downing Street on Saturday in their campaign to stop the Tory government from cutting the NHS student bursaries. After the march from St Thomas’ Hospital on Westminster Bridge a rally outside the Department...
LAST Friday’s mass picket of Ealing Hospital called by the West London Council of Action has shown the way forward for defending the NHS from the brutal attacks by the Tory government. Attacks in Ealing, as in the rest of the country, place money saving cuts before the lives of...
‘SAVE the Charlie Chaplin children’s ward! Don’t let it close!’ shouted over fifty local residents, workers and campaigners at the mass picket of Ealing Hospital last Friday morning. The West London Council of Action are calling for strike action of NHS workers inside the hospital and a march and strike...
THE decision on Thursday by the administrators to close all 163 BHS stores and throw 11,000 workers out of a job with immediate effect has caused a storm of ‘moral outrage’ from MPs and business leaders. Speaking on BBC radio on Friday morning, the head of the Institute of Directors,...
TUBE union RMT is demanding a ‘full and transparent formal investigation’ into the recent Canning Town overcrowding incident and calls for all London Underground station control rooms to be fully staffed. RMT said on Thursday that there ‘must be no cover-up’ over an incident last week where a passenger fell...
‘CHILDREN can get meningitis. If they have to take a child all the way to Northwick Park Hospital they could die on the way!’ 12-year-old Nick Roy said yesterday. Nick Roy had brought his dad to the mass picket of Ealing Hospital yesterday morning where over fifty local residents, workers...
A SURVEY of over 17,000 nursing staff has raised concerns that government plans to scrap student nurse bursaries will lead to even greater staff shortages in the NHS. Members of the RCN and other unions will march from St Thomas’ Hospital to Downing Street at 1pm today to protest against...
‘IT is time for Wendy’s to commit to justice and human rights – to choose meaningful and verifiable rights protections for the workers who pick your tomatoes, rather than continue to uphold a meaningless code of conduct that allows slavery to flourish.’ Last Thursday, the Fair Food Nation descended on...
LABOUR leader Corbyn was pushed yesterday for convincing reasons for voting to ‘Remain’ in the EU in the forthcoming referendum. He said that EU directives had ‘improved the UK’s beaches’, that ‘Three years ago the EU voted to restrict the use of some pesticides that are strongly linked to...
A PALESTINIAN-British schoolgirl Leanne Mohamad, who was crowned regional finalist in the ‘Speak Out’ Challenge has been barred from progressing further in the competition in an attempt to gag her. She won the regional competition in a speech entitled ‘Birds not Bombs’, which was about being a Palestinian and being...
INQUESTS into the deaths of 21 people in the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings are to be reopened, a coroner ruled yesterday. Louise Hunt, the senior coroner for Birmingham and Solihull, said there had been a ‘wealth of evidence that still has not been heard’ about the atrocities. The double bombing...
YESTERDAY, venture capitalists Greybull Capital, who purchased Tata’s steel works in Scunthorpe for £1, launched ‘British Steel’, hoping with the renaming, to summon up the memories of the stability, job security and the wage and pension levels that the nationalised industry offered to its workforce. Greybull describes itself...
A PALESTINIAN fisherman was injured and detained along with four others by Israeli naval troops who attacked them on Tuesday off the coast of Gaza. Israeli gunboats attacked the fishermen as they were sailing within six nautical miles from the coast of Gaza City, injuring at least one of them...
THE massive strike movement against the Socialist Party-imposed anti-union laws is continuing in France with the railways due to take national strike action today while the Paris Metro is due to begin an ‘open-ended’ strike action tomorrow. French President Francois Hollande yesterday again insisted that his imposed anti-union measures will...
HIGH levels of university staff on zero-hours contracts and the escalating pay dispute, where staff are being offered an insulting 1.1% ‘pay rise’ in contrast to the enormous salaries of vice-chancellors, are the burning issues to be discussed at the University College Union’s (UCU) annual conference opening...
NEARLY 40,000 Verizon workers, who have been on strike since April 13, are celebrating big gains after reaching a tentative agreement with the company – after 45 days of the largest strike in recent history. Verizon will add 1,300 new East Coast call centre jobs, and reverse several other outsourcing...