Monthly Archives: November 2016
REJOICE, rejoice at the great victories that the brave Syrian people are having in their struggle to prevent the Western imperialist powers and their Islamist mercenaries from destroying Syria and recolonising their historic country. The territory of east Aleppo, where 90,000 residents live, was liberated from the terrorists yesterday, the...
A GENERAL strike takes place in South Korea today, Wednesday 30th November, with President Park Guen-hye receiving dozens of letters from trade unions all over the world demanding her resignation. The strike is being organised by the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU). KCTU’s president, Han Sang-Gyun, is currently serving a...
‘WE FACE the greatest challenge in a generation,’ NHS Providers chief executive Chris Hopson told its annual conference in Birmingham yesterday. The just launched The state of the NHS provider sector report, the largest ever survey of NHS trust chairs and chief executives, revealed rising concern over the growing NHS...
‘UNCERTAINTY’ is the word on the lips of every banker and bourgeois politician today as they grapple with a capitalist system that is unravelling economically and politically at breakneck speed. It was the risk of causing uncertainty in the financial markets that was used by the Tory chancellor, Philip Hammond,...
THE National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) has rejected and expressed disgust at the Congress of South Africa Trade Unions’ (COSATU) endorsement of Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa as the future leader of the African National Congress (ANC). Last Thursday, COSATU’s central executive committee resolved to support and lobby...
THE death of Fidel Castro, the leader of the 1959 Cuban revolution sees millions of Cubans mourning their leader who secured the independence of their country from US imperialism and allowed the Cuban people to advance and make great gains, among them the construction of first class health and...
MAKE it Right for Palestine Campaign Year 2017 was launched on Saturday at the National Union of Teachers (NUT) HQ near Euston, north west London on Saturday afternoon. Meeting chair Anna Saif said: ‘November 2016-2017 is a very important year for the people of Palestine. It marks 100 years since...
THE quality and safety of patient care in general practice in England is under threat from rising workload pressures according to a major new British Medical Association (BMA) survey of more than 5,000 GPs. Key findings from the survey, which drew responses from 5,025 GPs across England, include: • Eight out...
STRIKING Durham Teaching Assistants have received international support with the Europe-wide public services union EPSU sending a message of ‘strength and solidarity’. The teaching assistants, working at both primary schools and nurseries, were out last Wednesday and Thursday in the latest 48-hour strike against an appalling attack on their pay...
THE ‘tyranny of the majority’ should not dictate exit from the EU, former Tory PM John Major said yesterday, in remarks that have sparked a powder keg of anger with his exposure of the fraud of ‘parliamentary democracy’. Major insists that a dictatorship, a tyranny of the minority capitalist...
THE Tory chancellor, Philip Hammond, closed his autumn budget statement on Wednesday with the announcement that this would be his ‘first and last’. Faithfully obeying the instructions of the IMF, Hammond and May have decided to abolish the autumn budget on the grounds that it leads to ‘uncertainty’. What is...
PEOPLE will need water, already scarce in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), even more desperately if temperatures rise because of climate change, said the World Bank in a report on the water situation in Gaza. In Palestine, water resources are critically scarce, and the situation in Gaza is...
LIVING standards are the worst since the last war ‘if not since the 1920s’, the leader of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) declared yesterday, adding that the outlook for wages is ‘dreadful’. In a separate analysis, the Resolution Foundation warned that the biggest losers between now and 2020 will...
CHANCELLOR Hammond used his Autumn Statement in the House of Commons yesterday to warn that the Tory war on the working class and poor is to be pursued relentlessly. He slashed ‘growth’ forecasts and made clear that the Tories have no intention of watering down Universal Credit or the Welfare...
CHANCELLOR Hammond began his Autumn statement yesterday by saying, ‘Our task now is to prepare our economy to be resilient as we exit the EU.’ With 90% of the big bosses and MPs opposed to this road, and determined to block it, this must be the understatement of the...
AIRPORT and fast-food workers are expected to be joined on picket lines by child care workers, home care workers and graduate assistants, who are among the estimated 64 million US workers who earn less than $15 an hour next Tuesday, November 29. The Fight for $15 campaign announced protests at...
YESTERDAY’S strike by RMT guards working for the privateer Southern rail network was ‘rock solid’, with RMT general secretary Mick Cash saying: ‘The resilience and solidarity of our members remains undiminished despite the threats and bullying thrown at them.’ The rail operator has indeed thrown everything at the guards, including...
STORM Angus, after ripping through the UK, has caused torrential downpours and flash floods that have destroyed homes, turned roads into rivers and left a ferry stranded at sea for 26 hours. Families are furious that, once again, flood defences have failed, after the government has persistently refused to invest...
The fourth mass anti-president rally in downtown Seoul last Saturday evening saw 600,000 workers, students and senior citizens, chanting slogans demanding scandal-hit President Park Geun-hye’s immediate resignation. The following day, Sunday, in a press conference at the Seoul Central District Prosecutors’ Office in southern Seoul, Lee Young-ryeol, head of...
MORE than a week after Donald Trump’s election as next US president, protesters continue to take to the streets in the US and elsewhere to condemn the billionaire’s xenophobic rhetoric. In Chicago, about 200 people marched from Federal Plaza to the Trump Tower on Saturday, vowing to create a ‘movement’...
THE TUC leadership reacted with shock when Theresa May made it quite clear that she had absolutely no intention of fulfilling her pledge to make companies put worker representatives on their board of directors. On being appointed as unelected Prime Minster she made a whole raft of pledges designed to...
AN AMBULANCE staff shortage has reached such a critical point, GPs warn, that very young and elderly patients are dying before getting to hospital. This is in no way the fault of the ambulance staff, they explain. The government cuts are so deep that there are simply not enough ambulance...
OVER 15,000 students, lecturers and supporters marched through central London on Saturday to demand free education for all. The largest education demonstration in years was organised by the National Union of Students (NUS) and the University and College Union (UCU). The young demonstrators carried NUS/UCU placards saying ‘Boycott NSS’ ‘No...
IN HIS speech on Saturday to the Labour Party Policy Forum Jeremy Corbyn proved that left reformism has absolutely no answers to the crisis of capitalism other than pledging to magically reform the system out of bankruptcy. Corbyn stated: ‘Political upheaval is becoming the norm. The old certainties are dramatically...
NHS Sustainability and Transformation Plans (STPs) will have to deliver £22bn in cuts by 2020/2021 in order to balance health and social care spending across 44 ‘footprint’ areas, BMA analysis has found. This raises serious concerns about cuts to services and the impact on patient care, the BMA (British Medical...
REVOLUTION - NEW ART FOR A NEW WORLD A Margy Kinmonth Film Director: Margy Kinmonth Created with the support of Alisher Usmanov, Founder of the Art, Science and Sport Charity Foundation Contributors: Museum Directors: Professor Mikhail Piotrovsky & Zelfira Tregulova Film Director: Andrei Konchalovsky 2017 WILL mark the centenary of one of the most important...
READING Borough Council has become the latest local authority to publish the NHS’s Draft Local Sustainability and Transformation Plan for its area. The Council has taken the decision to publish due to serious concerns about transparency of the draft document, drawn up by the NHS for the...
TODAY tens of thousands of lecturers and students will march through central London to demand free education for all. The Tory government has pushed plans through parliament with the help of Labour and Liberal MPs to break the £9,000 cap on university fees. Some universities had the cheek to raise...
PRESIDENT Bashar al-Assad gave an interview to RTP TV channel on 16 November 2016. Question 1: Mr. President, let’s start with Aleppo if you don’t mind. There are still thousands of civilians trapped, trying to survive in a sort of sub-human conditions in the middle of a deluge of bombs....
THE International Monetary Fund (IMF) has delivered a thinly veiled instruction to the Tory chancellor, Philip Hammond, to scrap his autumn budget statement due to be delivered next week. In a report by its Fiscal Transparency Evaluation unit the IMF expresses its fears that the Autumn Statement has since 2010...
THE UK’s so-called ‘elite Russell Group’ universities are the worst offenders when it comes to employing academics on precarious contracts, reveals a just released new analysis. With zero-hours exploitation rampant in higher education, it has emerged that three-fifths (59%) of academics at the research-intensive Russell Group of universities are employed...
THE government’s hospital closure programme could be derailed if masses of people take to the streets, said Chris Hopson, the leader of NHS England’s hospital sector yesterday. Hopson fears that massive public unrest will smash the Sustainability and Transformation Plans (STPs), for mass NHS hospital closures, which...
THE creation of new nursing assistant posts should be scrapped and money invested in ‘real nurses’, experts said yesterday ahead of the rollout of the new nursing associate roles next December. In fact, research in the BMJ Quality and Safety journal linked the use of junior care roles to higher...
HUNDREDS of armed riot police (MAT) in full gear viciously attacked a militant march in Athens against the visit of US President Barack Obama on Tuesday night. On Monday, the government of prime minister Alexis Tsipras issued, through the Athens Head of Police, an edict outlawing all marches and demonstrations...
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka released the following statement on the results of the 2016 presidential election in which he declared his willingness to work with President Trump. Donald Trump has been elected president. America is a democratic nation, and the voters have spoken. ''The AFL-CIO accepts the outcome of this...
SECRETARY General of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) Saed Erekat said yesterday that the international community has failed in its responsibility to correct the historical and continuing injustice of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. On the 28th occasion of the declaration of independence of the State of Palestine, Erekat said...
CIVIL servants working for the government’s Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) are on strike today over crippling cuts to their service: a quarter of its staff, are being threatened with the sack! Furthermore, offices in Birmingham, Leeds, Edinburgh and Newcastle are going to be shut down in March. On...
THE government was in the High Court yesterday where it won an injunction against striking prison staff. The court ordered prison staff to return to work yesterday afternoon. Up to 10,000 prison officers in England stopped work at midnight Monday in protest against a ‘surge in violence’ in jails. It...
PLANS to close A&Es, maternity services, children’s departments and entire hospitals up and down the country have begun to emerge as the Tory government’s secretive STP plans are leaking out. The Kings Fund carried out an investigation to answer the question: Why is the government and NHS England keeping these...
EXCESSIVE workload is blighting teachers’ professional lives, Chris Keates, General Secretary of the NASUWT teachers’ union, has told the Union’s Cymru Annual Conference. The assertion comes as 87% of teachers in Wales cited workload as their top concern in the NASUWT Cymru 2016 Big Survey 2016. Keates told the Conference,...
THE news at the weekend that the Syrian army had successfully driven Jaysh al-Fateh out of the western areas around Aleppo marks another decisive victory over the Western-backed terrorists groups and paves the way for the complete routing of imperialism in the country. Jaysh al-Fateh is the name of the...
THE government must not use ‘transformation’ plans as a cover for further cuts to the NHS, says the British Medical Association. Responding to a King’s Fund report on Sustainability and Transformation Plans (STPs), Dr Mark Porter, BMA council chair said: ‘Any plans about the future of the NHS must...