Monthly Archives: August 2016
PALESTINIAN prisoners held in Israeli custody at the Nafha, Ramon, Ktziot, and Hadarim prisons announced their decision on Saturday evening to go on a day-long solidarity hunger strike today, Tuesday, according to the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society (PPS). PPS released a statement saying that all Palestinian prisoners held in the four...
THE Court of Appeal ruled in favour of the Labour Party right wing and against Labour Party democracy last Friday afternoon, when it banned 130,000 new Labour Party members from taking part in the leadership election. Giving his ruling, Lord Justice Beatson said: ‘We allow the appeal. On the correct...
CROWDS of protesters gathered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on Saturday night after a police officer fatally shot a fleeing man. Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett appealed for calm after the rally turned violent as protesters set cars and properties ablaze and clashed with police. Officials confirmed that at least three people have...
THERE has been a £6 billion explosion in the pensions scheme deficit ‘black holes’ of Britain’s major retailers since the beginning of the year, it was claimed yesterday. The multi-billion pension liabilities at Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Marks and Spencer and the other major retailers have grown by 30% since the start...
THOUSANDS of workers gathered in Richmond, Virginia, on Friday and Saturday to push for a $15 per hour minimum wage. The first national Fight for $15 Convention took place at the Greater Richmond Convention Centre. About 10,000 people attended a march on Saturday down Monument Avenue and a rally...
WORLDWIDE the class struggle is being driven forward by the deepening world crisis of capitalism. This dictates to the bourgeoisie that its survival depends on it being able to crush the working class and destroy all of its basic rights and basic gains. Witness the US where the working class...
CHILDREN and young people with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) are not getting the support they need, according to eight-in-ten (83%) education staff. In addition, almost six-in-ten (58%) stated that pupils who are officially identified as having SEN do not receive the help they need to reach their potential....
THE Court of Appeal ruled in favour of the Labour Party right wing and against Labour Party democracy yesterday afternoon, when it banned 130,000 Labour Party members from taking part in the leadership election. Giving his ruling, Lord Justice Beatson said: ‘We allow the appeal. On the correct interpretation of the Party Rules, the National Executive Committee has the power to set the criteria for members to be eligible to vote in the leadership election in the way that it did. ‘We find that there is express provision in the Rules which enables them to do this, in particular where the Rules state: “The precise eligibility criteria, that is to say, to vote in the election, shall be defined by the National Executive Committee.” ‘With respect to the judge, we unanimously consider that he erred in law in reaching the contrary conclusion and therefore allow Mr McNicol’s (Labour...
JUNIOR doctors are set to renew their strike action in a ‘rolling programme of escalated industrial action beginning in early September’. The new chair of the Junior Doctors Committee (JDC) of the British Medical Association (BMA), Ellen McCourt, issued a letter to members on Thursday night calling on them to...
GMB is celebrating a landmark legal victory over German-owned, low-cost supermarket Lidl. The Central Arbitration Committee (CAC), the independent tribunal with statutory powers over trade union recognition, dismissed Lidl’s attempts to block warehouse operatives employed at the company’s Bridgend distribution centre from having a union represent their interests. GMB’s successful legal...
PALESTINE Liberation Organisation (PLO) EC member Hanan Ashrawi has strongly condemned Israel’s escalation of its illegal and inhumane measures in and around Jerusalem and in Area C of Occupied Palestine. Area C covers 60% of the West Bank and is home to an estimated 180,000-300,000 Palestinians, but now has a...
WEDNESDAY was another day of heroic Palestinian resistance against the occupying Israeli forces’ daily repressions and violence. (IPS) in Israel’s Megiddo prison banned 15 hunger striking prisoners from receiving visits from their lawyers, according to a statement released by the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society (PPS). The IPS claimed that the ban was...
A STRIKE wave is gripping South Africa with fishermen, media workers and fuel industry and electricity workers taking action. In an eleventh hour decision on Tuesday, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) applied for a strike certificate in order to down tools at the country’s energy...
HOSPITAL managers are to shut an NHS accident and emergency department down at night in order to combat a staffing crisis, caused by the NHS being starved of cash by the Tories. United Lincolnshire Hospitals NHS Trust said that closing the Grantham A&E rather than the departments at Lincoln County...
SUPPORTERS of Labour leader Corbyn have swept the board in elections to Labour’s ruling National Executive Committee, routing the right wing and giving it a clear message that, as far as Labour Party members are concerned, the Blairites and their supporters are to be dispatched directly into ‘the dustbin...
CALLING for urgent talks, rail union RMT yesterday repeated its offer to suspend Southern strike action. RMT General Secretary Mick Cash said: ‘I have written to Charles Horton today calling for talks to get back underway immediately in the Southern guards dispute. The union believes that there is a deal...
GP LEADERS yesterday slammed as ‘unacceptable’ the decision by St Helens Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) to suspend the non-urgent referral of patients to local hospitals for financial reasons. They urged the government to step in to resolve the crisis. Dr Richard Vautrey, BMA GP committee deputy chair, said: ‘This is...
PROTESTS were held in India and Zambia in parallel with last Friday’s AGM of British mining company Vedanta Resources at Ironmongers Hall, Barbican, London. Inside the AGM dissident shareholders asked questions submitted by Zambian villagers who are suing Vedanta in the UK for twelve years of polluted water, as well...
THIS is a huge victory for Labour Party members and party democracy,’ John McDonnell MP, Shadow Chancellor and chair of Jeremy for Labour, said yesterday. He was speaking following a High Court ruling that five new Labour Party members have a legal right to vote in the leadership contest between...
‘I CAN report that the strike action this morning is rock solid across the Southern Rail network as we fight to put rail safety before the profits of the failed Govia Thameslink operation.’ RMT General Secretary Mick Cash was speaking yesterday on the first day of the union’s ‘Keep the...
EVERY worker in the country, not just every commuter, must support the five-day RMT strike action on Southern. It is a fight for jobs, and a fight for rail safety against a vicious, profit-hungry employer, that is being bankrolled and encouraged by the anti-trade union May Tory government, to take...
ISRAEL continued its war on Palestinian youth on Sunday, with the arrest of a thirteen-year-old boy in occupied East Jerusalem. Israeli forces detained the child after allegedly finding a weapon in his possession, amid an ongoing crackdown on Palestinian children in the city, and following the passage of Israeli legislation...
THE Israeli Netanyahu regime is now working hard at its programme for the ‘final solution’ to the question of Palestine and the Palestinians. The Palestinian Ministry of Education and Higher Education has just turned down a request by Tel Aviv to teach the Israeli syllabus in schools across occupied East...
PALESTINIAN prisoners have been hitting the headlines around the world with the escalating wave of hunger strikes for the release of high-profile prisoners in Israeli jails being held in ‘administrative detention’. Bilal Kayed and the al-Balboul brothers, Mohammed and Mahmoud, are refusing food to fight for their freedom, putting their...
‘SELECTION belongs in the dustbin of history and has no place in modern society. There must be no going back,’ Labour’s Shadow Education Secretary Angela Rayner said yesterday. She was responding to reports that Tory PM May is planning to lift the ban on creating new grammar schools in...
UP TO 18 fire engines are unavailable to respond to emergencies each day in North Yorkshire because of chronic staff shortages, the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) has warned. The FBU said: ‘The public are being put at risk because firefighters from major towns and cities are being seconded to fill...
TWO reports this week have driven home the message that in the 21st century a bankrupt British capitalist system can no longer provide even the most basic human right of food and shelter for workers. An investigation by the BBC published yesterday revealed that across large parts of England people...
THREE thousand jobs are set to disappear after the owner of the Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey, has announced that the casino will close after Labor Day at the beginning of September. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump opened the Taj Mahal which bears his name 26...
ON WEDNESDAY the Adam Smith Institute admonished the Bank of England as ‘worse than useless’, and warned: ‘There is already a major crisis in Italy and mounting concerns about Deutsche Bank, the biggest bank in Europe and recently described by the International Monetary Fund as the most systemically...
THE United Nations Special Rapporteur, Maina Kiai, on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association made a visit to the United States from 11 to 27 July, and made a statement on the state of civil liberties in America. The statement covers everything from the right to...
‘THE FIRST thing that we will do is repeal the Health and Social Care Act. It must be repealed and that will effectively renationalise the National Health Service making it an NHS free from the creeping, nay galloping, privatisation,’ Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn pledged yesterday. Speaking in Dagenham, east London,...
THE Adam Smith Institute has just ‘lampooned’ the Bank of England stress tests – which sought to show that the UK’s banking system is prepared for the next crisis – as ‘worse than useless’, and designed to disguise the chronic weakness of the UK banking system. The Institute stated...
AT least 25 Palestinians were detained in raids from Monday evening to the early morning hours on Tuesday, as Israeli state forces stormed several villages and cities across the occupied West Bank, and sealed off the main road to the city of Hebron. The Israeli army raided the Hebron-area villages...
‘STRESS testing’ by the Bank of England (BoE) is to disguise the ‘chronic weakness’ of the UK banking system, a new report from the Adam Smith Institute says. The report lampoons the BoE’s ‘worse than useless’ stress tests and says that every single UK bank would fail the more rigorous...
ON Monday the US launched air strikes on the Libyan city of Sirte against ISIL, at the request of one of the current Libyan governments, the Unity government that the US, UK and France are currently backing. ‘At the request of the Libyan Government of National Accord, the United States...
HOUSING has become a ‘national emergency’ as it emerged the proportion of home ownership has fallen to the lowest level since 1986 and, as rents spiral, housing charity Shelter said that 117 families in Britain become homeless every day. Meanwhile, The Resolution Foundation, in a report released yesterday, said that...
PALESTINIAN prisoner of Israel’s jails, Bilal Kayed, today, Wednesday 3rd August, enters his 50th day of hunger strike for his freedom. Kayed, a member of Palestine’s largest left-wing faction the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was held in Israeli prison for 14-and-a-half years before his release was due...
GRANTS were abolished yesterday leaving hundreds of thousands of poorer students with a stark choice: either spend the rest of your life in debt, or drop out of education completely. Until yesterday students living away from home, whose families take home less than £42,620 a year, were eligible to apply...
SECRETARY of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, Dave Oliver, has written a letter speaking out about the abuse of youth in a detention facility in Australia’s Northern Territory. Horrendous footage emerged on state television last week of youth being ‘spit-hooded’, stripped naked, forced into restraining positions for long periods...
LAST Friday the European Banking Authority (EBA) published the results of its stress test on 51 of the biggest banks throughout Europe and Britain. Fearful of what they would find the EBA decided for the first time not to issue pass or fail marks to the banks but merely to...
DEMOCRATIC Party Presidential hopeful, Hillary Clinton, is to order a ‘full review’ of the United States’ strategy on Syria as a ‘first key task’ of her presidency, if elected, resetting the policy to emphasise the ‘murderous’ nature of the Assad regime, a foreign policy adviser with her campaign has...
NORMAL banking operations were disrupted across the whole of India on Friday as bank employee unions went on strike last Friday to protest against the merger of State Bank of India’s (SBI’s) associates with the parent, and the privatisation of the state-run IDBI Bank (formerly Industrial Development Bank...
LABOUR leader Jeremy Corbyn has called for right wing Labour MPs to ‘think again’ after reports that some are planning a ‘semi-split’ breakup of the party. Saturday’s Daily Telegraph reported that a group of senior Labour MPs are looking at plans to set up ‘alternative Labour’ if Corbyn stays on...