Monthly Archives: October 2016
DOCTORS, nurses and NHS staff on hearing the demands blasting out of the megaphone ‘Re-open Maternity! Re-open the Charlie Chaplin childrens’ ward!’ stopped to show their support on the mass picket of Ealing Hospital yesterday morning. The 50-strong picket shouted: ‘All out with the junior doctors! General strike now’ and...
CUTTING the amount the NHS spends on agency midwives would solve the midwife shortage, says the Royal College of Midwives (RCM) in a new report. Last year, the NHS spent over £72 million on agency, overtime and bank midwives. For the same cost, 3,318 full-time midwives could have been employed...
THE British ruling class, far from recovering from the Brexit mutiny, when its chosen policy for saving British capitalism – that of ceding its sovereignty permanently to the EU – was rejected by over 17 million workers, is now in an ever-intensifying crisis. This is an historic crisis, with...
SAYYED Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Lebanon’s Hezbollah resistance movement, says a new Intifada (uprising) is the right choice for Palestinians to fight the Israeli regime’s occupation of their homeland. He made the comments on Wednesday in a ceremony held in Beirut to observe Ashura, which marks the martyrdom anniversary...
HUMAN rights groups warned the United Nations this week that a new British law allowing police to see journalists’ communications threatens sensitive sources and freedom of expression. The English Pen writers association and the freedom of speech group Article 19 told the UN Human Rights Council that the Investigatory Powers...
WAR hysteria dominated the Parliamentary debate on Tuesday, with both Tory and Labour MPs pushing for a full-scale war against Russia over unproven accusations of ‘war crimes’ in Syria. The three-hour-long frenzy for shooting down Russian planes was instigated by Tory MP Andrew Mitchell, a former international development secretary and...
LAST Saturday saw what was one of the worst atrocities committed in the Yemen since Saudi Arabia, along with its Gulf allies, launched an all-out war to destroy the country and overthrow the Houthi regime. A mass funeral gathering in the Yemeni city of Sa’ana was targeted by an air...
‘JEREMY Hunt hear us say, NHS is here to stay!’ and ‘One fight – we are all united!’ chanted campaigners fighting to save A&Es from Banbury, Grantham, Huddersfield and Stafford on Monday. Over 150 of them had descended on London to hand in petitions to Downing Street and demonstrate outside...
PUSHING for the UK to begin openly bombing Syrian army positions and to consider taking action against Russian aircraft, Tory MP for Sutton Coldfield, Andrew Mitchell, requested an extraordinary emergency debate in Parliament yesterday. Mitchell told the House of Commons that he called for a ‘No Fly Zone’ over parts...
‘ALL the unions should take part in a Day of Action for the NHS,’ Steve Mathan of Hands Off HRI told News Line yesterday. Over 150 campaigners fighting to save Huddersfield Royal Infirmary (HRI) A&E had joined others from Banbury, Stafford and Grantham in descending on London to hand in...
‘THE Southern guards strike will go ahead, despite any legal challenge,’ RMT Assistant General Secretary Mick Lynch said defiantly on the eve of their three-day strike, beginning today. Guards walk out at 6am and are forming picket lines outside stations up and down the line from London Bridge...
A PALESTINIAN was fatally shot on Monday by Israeli forces’ fire, after he carried out a shooting attack against Israelis in Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood in Jerusalem. Israeli reports said that Mesbah Abu Sbaih, 39, who was driving his car near the national headquarters of the Israeli Police in the neighbourhood,...
THE Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond, and the Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, were forced to sit a test yesterday administered by officials from the US Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank. The only question put to these two was simply: what will you...
PRESIDENT Bashar al-Assad affirmed that the United States doesn’t have the will to reach any agreement about Syria, and that Syria knew in advance that the US agreement with Russia will not succeed because the main part of that agreement is to attack al-Nusra which is an ‘American card’...
‘TEACHERS working 60 hours a week is totally unacceptable and is exacerbating the teacher shortage,’ warns Kevin Courtney, General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers, today. Commenting on the Education Policy Institute’s publication Teacher workload and professional development in England’s secondary schools: insights from TALIS, Courtney said: ‘This report...
IN THE early hours of last Friday, a seismic crash in the value of the pound against the dollar caused panic amongst the world’s traders and speculators. The value of the pound dropped by more than 8% from $1.26 to $1.1491 in just eight minutes. This represents a massive drop...
‘OUR strike is very effective. The cinema is completely closed down!’ BECTU rep and Ritzy cinema worker, Kelly Rogers, told News Line yesterday. Workers at the Ritzy cinema in Brixton, south London, held their second one-day strike yesterday, as news broke that cinema workers at the Picture House in Hackney,...
MORE than 1,100 California social workers and eligibility workers conducted a three-day strike in Contra Costa County, then voted on Wednesday to extend their unfair labour practice strike by another day. SEIU 1021 members are protesting against Contra Costa County Executives’ campaign of intimidation and threats against workers who have...
THE STRIKE of the Southern guards, which begins on Tuesday, is a pivotal struggle for the entire working class. What is under threat is the fundamental right to strike. As talks broke down on Thursday lunch-time, train union RMT confirmed that the 14 days of strike action are going ahead....
THE BATTLE is on! RMT confirmed yesterday that the Southern guards’ strike is going ahead. Meanwhile Southern Rail confirmed it will carry out its threat and sack every single guard! After last-ditch talks broke down yesterday lunchtime, Govia Thameslink Railway (GTR), the parent company of Southern Railway, said:...
THERESA May’s speech closing the Tory conference on Wednesday revealed all the weakness of the Tory Party – a party reeling from the mass movement of workers and youth that defied all the threats and intimidation by the bankers and employers during the EU referendum. After seven years of the...
THIS year’s World Teachers’ Day, which takes place every October 5th, marked the 50th anniversary of the ILO/UNESCO Recommendation concerning the status of teachers, which reaffirms the key role played by the teaching profession in the lives of their students and communities. ‘The desire to build equity – in the...
YESTERDAY PM Theresa May set out her ‘vision for Britain after Brexit’ in a key note speech to their party conference in Birmingham in which she masqueraded the Tory party as the party for ‘ordinary working class people’. After seven years of permanent austerity plunging working class and middle class...
YESTERDAY the Tory offensive against not just junior doctors but the entire foundation of the National Health Service reached a ‘watershed moment for the NHS’ in the words of junior doctors’ leader Dr Ellen McCourt. October 5 was the day that the Tory health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, decreed his dictatorial...
WORLD leaders are spectacularly failing refugees, says Amnesty International UK in its latest report Tackling Global World Refugee Crisis – from Shirking to Shared Responsibility. Amnesty’s press release stressed: ‘Refugees are people who have had to flee their country because of war or persecution. They cannot return to their own...
‘IT IS a very hollow gesture, to open up more spaces while simultaneously driving doctors out of the profession,’ said Dr Aislinn Macklin-Doherty. She was responding to Tory health secretary Jeremy Hunt’s announcement yesterday that the number of medical school places will increase by 25% from 2018. The government’s plan...
AT THE Tory Party conference yesterday, Theresa May and her defence secretary Michael Fallon jointly announced that in any future war British troops would not be bound by the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). May claimed the change would ‘put an end to the industry of vexatious claims’, while...
‘FREE the 15 Alexandria dockworkers from jail and drop all charges’ demanded trade unionists in a letter to the Egyptian Minister and migration last Friday. The Spanish trade union Confederación Sindical de Comisiones Obreras (CCOO) letter, dated 29 September 2016, stated: ‘Re: Detention of naval dockyard employees ‘We have been informed that...
THE writing is most definitely on the wall for Europe’s largest bank, with the kiss of death being delivered over the weekend when German industrialists lined up to publicly state their total confidence in Deutsche Bank, describing it as having a ‘solid base’ and a ‘good future’, with BASF...
NEW Tory Chancellor Philip Hammond made it absolutely crystal clear yesterday that there would be no end to austerity under his watch. Speaking to the Tory party conference in Birmingham he said: ‘Let me be clear, we are ready to take whatever steps are necessary to protect this economy from...
ISRAELI police at dawn carried out a large-scale detention campaign in the Jerusalem area, detaining at least 18 Palestinians before releasing them after handing them a 15-day ban from entering al-Aqsa Mosque compound, the third holiest Islamic site in Islam. Meanwhile Israeli forces on Sunday detained three Palestinians, including two...
UNICEF UK is appealing to the British government to speed up the transfer of unaccompanied child refugees from the ‘Jungle’ refugee camp in Calais. The UN charity says it is concerned the planned closure of the camp will lead to children there disappearing before they are processed. Charities estimate there...
‘THIS is just pre-conference spin to try to improve the Tories toxic reputation on their shabby treatment of disabled people,’ said Disabled People Against cuts (DPAC) yesterday. It was responding to Work and Pensions Secretary Damian Green’s announcement that disabled people with permanent or progressive conditions would no longer have...
US-led coalition airstrikes on Syria killed nine civilians in the east of the town of Mare, approximately 25 kilometres north of Aleppo yesterday. Meanwhile, the Syrian army wrested control of al-Kandi Hospital, south of the Handarat refugee camp – also located in Aleppo’s northern suburbs — from foreign-backed terrorists, killing...
ON THE eve of the Tory Party Conference, with the party split from stem to stern over Brexit, Tory leaders have announced that they are to continue with PM May’s conversion to the corporatist views of ex-Labour leader Ed Miliband that she displayed after she was appointed by the...
THE RCN and other unions representing health service employees in the UK yesterday called on the NHS pay review body to recommend an above-inflation pay rise. In the submission the unions have warned that the 1% public sector pay cap is no longer sustainable as trusts already struggle to recruit...
AN estimated 150 Indian students are fighting being kicked out of New Zealand because their supporting visa documents were forged by agents in India. The students have called for a reprieve and went to lobby a public meeting on Monday held by Deputy Prime Minister Bill English and National Party...
NOT one, but two tuition fee hikes have been announced by the Tory government in the last two weeks: first to £9,250 and then yesterday to £9,500. This makes the national demonstration through central London on Saturday 19 November called by the students’ union, the NUS, and lecturers’ union, the...