Monthly Archives: May 2017
AN ESCALATING strike sweeping through Colombia, led by teachers and other state employees, saw at least half a million workers striking and marching on Monday and Tuesday this week. Citizens in the Pacific Choco province have engaged in an all-out civic strike since Wednesday last week, against the national government’s broken...
PM MAY unveiled the Tory election manifesto yesterday in Halifax as she dumped Cameron’s policy towards the elderly and instead gave them a good beating before spelling out that she is to pursue them into the grave. May will enrich care home providers by including the value of a person’s...
ANNA ATHOW, WRP candidate for Hornsey and Wood Green, was campaigning with a team outside Haringey Sixth Form College yesterday. Talking to youth about their policy to scrap all student fees and restore free state education, Chanelle signed up and told them, ‘I agree education should be free and it...
TORY PM Theresa May yesterday declared war on pensioners and their children yesterday with the launch of her party’s election manifesto. This includes means testing and scrapping winter fuel payments to better-off pensioners. May said the payments will apply ‘to the poorest pensioners but not for the rest’. At the...
THE Labour Party manifesto launched on Tuesday contained a number of slight but significant changes from the draft leaked to the press last week. On the EU, the manifesto talks of negotiating ‘transitional arrangements to avoid a “cliff edge” for the economy’ rather than reversing the referendum result. The fudged...
WAGE growth is lagging behind inflation for the first time since mid-2014, official figures show. Average weekly earnings excluding bonuses increased by 2.1% in the three months to March, while inflation rose by 2.3% in the year to March 2017. In the first three months of this year, wages fell...
THE Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) welcomed pledges made in Labour’s election manifesto. Mark Serwotka, PCS general secretary, said: ‘Labour’s pledges to end the public sector pay cap, improve collective bargaining, repeal anti-trade union legislation and strengthen employment rights stand in stark contrast to the Conservatives’ bogus claims on...
LABOUR Leader Corbyn, launching Labour’s manifesto at Bradford University yesterday, sought to launch a gradual Fabian ‘revolution’, at a snail’s pace, to begin to change things for the better for the many at the expense of the few, as featured in the Times Rich List. He said: ‘We are ruling...
FEARS are growing that Israel will risk a surprise strike to cripple Hezbollah. For more than a decade, the assessment that another war between Israel and Hezbollah would be massively destructive to both sides has helped create a mutual balance of terror resulting in a cautious calm along Lebanon’s southern...
‘THE PEOPLE will be very badly harmed by the closures of Southall JobCentre and Ealing Hospital,’ Raj Anton told News Line outside the closure-threatened jobcentre yesterday morning. The vote Arj Thiara WRP for Ealing Southall campaign team met visitors to the jobcentre and students at Southall College yesterday, who said...
AT THE party’s manifesto launch in Bradford yesterday Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said: ‘Today we set out a vision to transform Britain for the 21st century. ‘This manifesto is the first draft of a better future for the people of our country. A blueprint of what Britain could be and...
THE leadership of the TUC yesterday stuck the knife into the backs of the working class when it called for workers to look more favourably on any future Tory government and to consider voting Tory on June 8th. This act of treachery was delivered by its general secretary, Francis O’Grady,...
THE British Medical Association yesterday welcomed Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s pledge to give the NHS an extra £37 billion over the course of the next Parliament, including £10 billion of capital funding to make sure that NHS buildings and IT systems are fit for the modern day. (see page...
NAKBA Commemoration in the Balfour Declaration Centenary Year: It’s time to go home! It’s time to make it right for Palestine. The Right of Return ‘I Come from There I come from there and I have memories Born as mortals are, I have a mother And a house with many windows, I have brothers,...
ON FRIDAY afternoon a terrorist cyber attack was launched on the NHS in England and Scotland that brought it to a standstill in many areas, a standstill that is still continuing. The terrorists encrypted vital NHS patient information to prevent doctors having access to it so that patients...
‘FROM the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,’ shouted Palestinians and their supporters demonstrating opposite the Israeli embassy, west London, on Saturday to mark Nakba (Catastrophe) Day. Usually held on May 15 Nakba is the annual commemoration of the displacement by terror that preceded and followed the Israeli...
THE VAST majority of nurses are prepared to strike over pay, the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) warned yesterday as it announced a ‘summer of protest’. Over 50,000 RCN members voted in the pay poll that was launched in late April. Nine in ten (91%) said they would support industrial...
ARAB writers convening at the First Palestine Forum for the Arab Novel appealed on Wednesday to world governments to intervene to end the suffering of the hunger-striking Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. The appeal went as follows: ‘We, the undersigned Arab writers who gathered at the First Palestine Forum for the...
THE Head of the Prisoners’ Affairs Committee Issa Qaraqe said on Friday afternoon, the 26th day of the prisoners’ hunger strike, that negotiations could take place between the Israeli authorities and leaders of the mass indefinite hunger strike of 1,600 Palestinian prisoners during the coming hours of Friday. Qaraqe told...
STUDENTS at Hackney Community College in Shoreditch, east London joined the campaign yesterday to elect Workers Revolutionary Party candidate for Hackney South and Shoreditch Jonty Leff. They were determined to fight against the cuts to their college, to end all university fees and were inspired by the policies of the...
LABOUR’S leaked General Election Manifesto starts with a declaration that ‘Labour understands that wealth creation is a collective endeavour – between investors, workers, public services, and government. Each contributes and each must share equitably in the rewards.’ This is just after the publication of the latest Sunday Times Rich list,...
THE leaked draft of Labour’s election manifesto yesterday brought out the predictable headlines in the press warning of the dangerous ‘socialist’ Jeremy Corbyn. But a close reading of this leaked document reveals that, far from threatening the very foundations of British capitalism, it is nothing more than a re-statement of...
AN INQUEST jury has condemned the police restraint of a young black man in a mental health hospital whilst medical staff looked on. The inquest into the death of Olaseni Lewis took place before the Senior Coroner for the South London Area, Selena Lynch at South Croydon Coroner’s Court from...
MEMBERS of the University and College Union (UCU) at Manchester Metropolitan University will be on strike later this month after they overwhelmingly backed industrial action. Four-fifths of members who voted (79%) backed strike action in a ballot which ran from Thursday 6 April to Monday 8 May. The union announced...
WORKERS’ wages will be slashed even more as inflation hits a peak of 3.4% this year, according to an analysis by the National Institute of Economic & Social Research. With public sector wages, including NHS staff, capped by the Tories at 1% and wage increases for other workers generously estimated...
DOCTORS’ leaders warned yesterday that the UK is facing a ticking time bomb in public health, with a lack of leadership on improving the nation’s health risking the future sustainability of the NHS, and public health budgets facing a cut of £400 million from 2015/16 to 2020/21. This comes...
‘WE HAVE four weeks. Four weeks to take our message to voters to convince them Britain can be better,’ Jeremy Corbyn, Leader of the Labour Party, told an enthusiastic audience at the party’s election campaign launch in Manchester yesterday. He said: ‘We can transform Britain into a country that, instead...
LABOUR Leader Corbyn opened the Labour Party general election campaign yesterday by stating: ‘We have four weeks. Four weeks to take our message to voters to convince them Britain can be better. It can be transformed. It doesn’t have to be like this. We can transform Britain into a...
ISRAELI doctors’ organisation Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI) is calling on the World Medical Association to instruct doctors around the world not to cooperate with the Israeli Prisons Service’s plans to import doctors from abroad to force-feed Palestinian hunger strikers. Over 1,600 ‘Freedom and Dignity’ hunger strikers in Israeli...
THE AUGUSTA Victoria Hospital in occupied East Jerusalem announced on Sunday that it would no longer accept new patients, owing to a ‘crisis level’ financial situation due to excessive delays in payments from the Palestinian Authority (PA), amounting to some $41.78 million. The private hospital, which receives patients referred by...
THE RESULT of the French Presidential election on Sunday saw the right-wing centrist candidate, Emmanuel Macron, winning with 65.5% of the vote beating the leader of the neo-fascist National Front party, Marine Le Pen, who secured 34.5%. This victory for the ex-merchant banker and former economy minister under the previous...
TRADE unions, students and youth marched through the streets of Paris yesterday against Emmanuel Macron’s proposed ‘Labour Reforms’ on the very next day after his election. President-elect Macron’s ‘Labour Reforms’ make it easier to hire and fire workers and remove the 35-hour week, instead bosses can ‘negotiate directly...
THE working class must kick out the Tories on June 8th and return Labour to government to set the scene for the struggle for socialism, both throughout the UK and throughout Europe, including an immediate break with the European Union. PM May’s decision to hold a snap general election, after...
THE just-published Sunday Times rich list shows that in austerity-hit UK – where millions of workers have not had a rise in the ten years since the last banking crash, where the disabled and the poor are being targeted as benefit cheats, and where the NHS is being starved...
LABOUR will not raise taxes for the vast majority of workers but will increase rates for those earning over £80,000, John McDonnell said yesterday. He pledged to be Britain’s ‘first socialist Labour chancellor’. McDonnell said in a speech in London’s Docklands that Labour is on the side of working families:...
GENERAL Practice in the North of Ireland is close to collapse with the General Practitioners Committee (GPC) seeking to collect enough undated resignations to ‘walk away from the NHS’. Speaking with Pulse, GPC Northern Ireland chair Dr Tom Black said that Local Medical Committee (LMC) leaders were warning of practices...
YOUTH across Europe are a revolutionary force that are ready to rise up against the ‘generation in power’ in their countries and in the EU, and bring them down, breaking up the European Union, a survey called ‘Generation What?’ has confirmed. The results of the survey has left the European...
RAIL union RMT has launched a campaign to fight a planned programme of ticket office closures the length and breadth of the Greater Anglia franchise. The company has informed the union that across the Greater Anglia network they currently have 64 ticket offices with an establishment of 358 ticket office...
HOTELS and restaurants in the Gaza Strip suspended serving meals and drinks on Tuesday from 9am to 3pm, and instead served their customers a mixture of salt and water, in solidarity with hunger-striking Palestinian prisoners, who had been consuming the same mixture in Israeli prisons for 16 days as...
ROLLS-ROYCE workers walk out on strike this morning as the struggle over the great ‘pensions robbery’ escalates. 3,500 car workers across the German car giant’s plants in Oxford, Sussex, Swindon and Birmingham are determined to defend their final salary pension schemes. Today’s 24-hour strike is the fourth out of...
THE TORIES plan to call a snap vote in parliament to authorise British airstrikes against the legitimate Syrian government forces of President Assad should they win a large majority in the general election according to authoritative sources close to the Tory party. While no official announcement of intention has been...
‘ISRAEL cannot silence us, nor isolate us, nor break us, our chains will be broken before we are,’ Fatah leader Marwan Barghouthi has said in a statement issued by the Palestinian Liberation Organisation. The leader of 1,600 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons who have today been on hunger strike for...