Monthly Archives: November 2016
A POWERFUL News Line 47th Anniversary and 76th Anniversary of Leon Trotsky’s Assassination Rally, with 200 workers, students and youth in attendance, was held at Cambridge House in Camberwell, south east London on Saturday. Jonty Leff, News Line Assistant Editor told the rally: ‘We are living through a period of...
IN response to a pledge by US President-elect Donald Trump to move the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, Palestinian ambassador to the United Nations Riyad Mansour has threatened to ‘unleash all of the weapons that we have in the UN against the United States’. Last Tuesday, Trump won...
LIBERAL Democrat, Labour and SDLP MPs have said they are prepared to vote against triggering Article 50 which begins the process of leaving the EU. Lib Dem leader Tim Farron said his party would oppose it, unless they were promised a second referendum on the UK’s Brexit deal with EU...
PUBLIC sector workers union SIPTU has declared that it will authorise strike ballots unless the Irish Government opens talks on public service pay. SIPTU General President, Jack O’Connor, announced on Thursday that the union will authorise ballots for industrial action among its 60,000 members in the public service unless the...
THE TORY plan to reduce Britain to a slave labour, hire-and-fire, zero-hours economy is now being challenged powerfully by groups of young workers. With the introduction of Uber, the government saw a tremendous potential to undo hundreds of years of struggle by the working class, through their trade unions, to...
ON Tuesday, amidst all the turmoil of the US presidential election, the Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, announced a financial bombshell that when it goes off will lead to everyone with a bank account suddenly waking up to discover their money has gone – confiscated to...
THE number of emergency food supplies given out by Farnborough Foodbank has risen by 5.27% in the last year. Farnborough Foodbank is part of The Trussell Trust, a national network of food banks giving out nutritionally balanced emergency food to people in crisis. During April to September this year, 1,557...
THOUSANDS of public workers have stormed the Rio de Janeiro assembly, occupying the building in protest at the right wing Brazilian government’s savage cuts to workers’ salaries. Many of the protesters were policemen and firefighters who hadn’t been paid in months. The government cuts, including the cuts to salaries, were...
EARLY on Wednesday morning Donald Trump’s Republican Party reached the all-important 270 electoral college votes, meaning that he had won the election to become the 45th president of the United States. By mid-morning, once all of the votes had been counted there were 289 electoral college votes for the Republicans...
THE Democrats lost the presidential election some time ago, when the party nominated Hillary Clinton for the presidency and pushed Bernie Sanders aside using any and every means that was on hand to defeat his political revolution and his drive for the Party to give expression to the needs...
OVER 100 Deliveroo food delivery company couriers and supporters met in Camden, northwest London on Tuesday evening to discuss their campaign against slave labour pay and conditions. The Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (IWGB) general secretary Jason Moyer-Lee outlined the situation facing Deliveroo couriers as follows: ‘Currently Deliveroo riders...
YEMEN’S 20-month war has killed over 7,000 people and wounded nearly 37,000, the World Health Organisation (WHO) says, and a UN envoy has voiced alarm over the worsening humanitarian situation. ‘More than 7,070 people have been killed and over 36,818 injured’ as of October 25, the WHO said in a...
THE UK government’s welfare ‘reforms’ amount to a ‘systematic violation’ of the rights of disabled people, according to an inquiry by the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). The UN published its report in Geneva on Monday afternoon, and denounced the ruling Conservative Party’s cuts...
THE Public and Commercial Services union has described the government’s imposition of further cuts to redundancy terms as a ‘despicable act of bad faith’ and is considering a legal challenge. Ministers have announced that detrimental changes to the civil service compensation scheme will be imposed tomorrow, despite the union only...
‘THE goverment’s priority at every stage following the European Union referendum has been to respect the outcome of that referendum and to ensure it is delivered on,’ Tory Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, David Davis said in a statement to parliament yesterday. ‘To leave the European Union...
‘CUTTING social security even further and plunging more families into poverty is simply cruel, punishing the poorest in our society for the Tories’ economic failure,’ Public and Commercial Services union (PCS) general secretary Mark Serwotka said yesterday. He was responding to a lowering in the cap on the amount of benefits a...
FOR THE first time a comprehensive analysis of the economic and social impact of the war waged by the Tory government under Margaret Thatcher against British industry in a conscious attempt to smash the organised working class has been published. Thatcher came to power in the 1980s determined to destroy...
ALMOST all of the children who have spent time in the so-called ‘Jungle’ camp in Calais for refugees have a post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), says the Citizens UK charity. Delays in transfers out of Calais or being housed in storage containers has left many youths with deteriorating mental health. There...
YESTERDAY Tory PM May pledged that she would not allow the British people’s vote for Brexit to be sabotaged. The would-be sabatoeurs are the majority of MPs of all parties, Labour, Tory, Liberal, Welsh Nationalist and SNP, most of the peers of the realm, and the judiciary who are now...
OVER 5,000 library campaigners, trade unionists, their families and supporters marched against cuts and closures from the British Library through central London to Trafalgar Square last Saturday. Children’s laureate Chris Riddell and former children’s laureate Michael Rosen were among those assembling at the British Library. Banners on the march included...
JUNIOR doctors have been considering more strikes after the chairman of the British Medical Association’s junior doctors’ committee resigned last Friday night, following a backlash following her decision to call off planned strikes. The BMA junior doctors committee met on Saturday. Dr Ellen McCourt said it had become clear to...
THE TORY government has launched its new offensive in the war against the NHS, and this time it is an attack by stealth. Sustainability and Transformation Plans (STPs) have been drawn up by 44 STP boards. However, what these plans entail remained a secret until some of the details were...
STEPHEN Phillips Tory MP for Sleaford and North Hykeham quit as an MP yesterday. He had a majority of more than 24,000 over Labour in his Lincolnshire seat. He said that he was resigning over ‘irreconcilable policy differences’ with the May government. Counting the resignation as a Tory MP of...
OVER 120,000 children in Britain face spending this Christmas homeless and in temporary accommodation, the highest level since 2007, Shelter’s new analysis of government figures shows. A new investigation carried out by the charity has uncovered the harrowing impact of homelessness on families and children in Britain. Alarmingly, the figures...
YESTERDAY’S ruling by three High Court judges that the Tory government does not have the right to trigger Article 50 is the latest and most blatant move by the judiciary to overturn the vote to leave the capitalist conspiracy that is the EU. Article 50 is the mechanism which when...
A NEW revolutionary uprising has erupted in Morocco, with mass street protests spreading around the whole country. The uprising began in ‘The Rif,’ a mainly mountainous region of northern Morocco. Monday saw outraged students in the northern city of Al-Hoceima boycotting school and taking to the streets. Protesters shouted:...
THE JUDICIARY yesterday sought to rescue the Parliament from the people with its ruling that the House of Commons must agree before the process of the UK leaving the European Union can begin. This means the government cannot trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, beginning formal exit negotiations with...
ONE hundred and twenty thousand children will wake up homeless this Christmas across Britain, Shelter warned yesterday. Shelter has launched an urgent appeal after an in-depth investigation has uncovered the shocking reality of ‘hidden homelessness.’ The amount of children languishing in temporary accommodation has hit a ten-year high,...
UK inflation will quadruple to about 4% in the second half of next year and cut disposable income, the National Institute for Economic and Social Research (NIESR) has predicted. The rise in prices will ‘accelerate rapidly’ during 2017 as the fall in sterling is passed on to consumers, according to...
THE Royal College of Emergency Medicine yesterday welcomed the findings of the report into the pressures facing emergency departments throughout the winter. The report finds that the pressures usually seen in winter are now year round and in part attributes the problems to a lack of social care provision and...
THE 11-day-old actors’ strike against video game industry will not end until the companies compromise on their refusal to offer some type of residuals for the most successful games, Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) said on Monday. Insisting that it had already compromised enough, the...
RMT leaders yesterday responded defiantly to Southern rail’s threat that if guards strike and do not sign new contracts by Friday, they will be considered to have sacked themselves. At a 300-strong national demonstration opposite parliament against driver only trains, they called for a general strike. RMT president Sean Hoyle...
A THIRD of all A&Es across the country are set to close under the Tory government’s new Sustainability and Transformation Plans (STPs), causing the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) to voice its ‘extreme concern’. President of the College Dr Tajek Hassan said: ‘These plans that are emerging via different...
HOME Secretary Amber Rudd told MPs on Monday in the House of Commons that a review into the police attack on pickets during the miners strike in 1984 at Orgreave is not in the public interest. This is after both PM May and Rudd had given the impression that there...
NURSING Associates have been given the go-ahead to administer drugs, unsupervised, to the alarm of the nurses’ union RCN. NHS to train 2,000 new Nursing Associates to administer drugs unsupervised and monitor the sickest patients, nurses were rightly extremely concerned. Rather than address the staffing crisis by recruiting and training...
THE panic gripping the world capitalist class over the impending crash of the banking system reached another new level on Monday with the publication of a report by KPMG titled ‘The Profitability of EU Banks: Hard Work or a Lost Cause?’ KPMG is one of the world’s four largest auditors...
IRAQI paramilitary forces battled the Islamic State group southwest of Mosul on Sunday, the second day of an operation to cut jihadist supply lines between the city and neighbouring Syria. Tens of thousands of Iraqi troops and Kurdish peshmerga fighters have been advancing on Mosul from the north, east and...
‘I HAVE concluded that there is no case for either a statutory inquiry or an independent review,’ into the battle of Orgreave, home secretary Amber Rudd declared in Parliament. Labour MP for Leigh, Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham said: ‘Given that the IPCC (independent Police Complaints Commission) found evidence of perjury...
THE TORY government’s claim that it is injecting an extra £10bn into the NHS in England over the next five years is simply ‘misleading,’ the Health Select Committee said. BMA chair of council Dr Mark Porter responded yesterday: ‘Theresa May talks about injecting £10bn into the NHS, yet in reality...