Monthly Archives: June 2017
RISING numbers of students from more disadvantaged homes are dropping out of universities in England before completing their studies, figures show. The proportion of youngsters from disadvantaged families who do not continue after their first year has reached the highest level for five years, says the Office for Fair Access....
EVERY WORKER AND YOUTH must take to the streets for this Saturday’s million strong: ‘Kick the Tories out march. Labour Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell has called for a million to join the march. This march has been called to bring the Tories down. Otherwise we will have...
Adults in the Room MY BATTLE WITH EUROPE’S DEEP ESTABLISHMENT Yanis Varoufakis Publisher: The Bodley head Price £20 Varoufakis was the professor of economics and expert at ‘game theory’ who in January 2015 became the Greek finance minister in the left-wing, anti-austerity Syriza government led by his friend Alexis Tsipras. The opening pages of the book...
UCU members at West London College sites in Hammersmith, Acton, Ealing and Southall were on strike yesterday against job losses. Fourteen staff face loosing their job as A-level teaching has stopped and cuts are being made to computing & IT and access courses. During the ballot for strike action the...
A MOTION moved on behalf of the London Regional Council by Anna Athow demanding the Tory NHS Sustainability and Transformation Plans (STPs) are ‘abandoned’ was passed with an overwhelming majority at the BMA’s Annual Representative Meeting (ARM) in Bournemouth on Monday. Doctors debated the future of Sustainability and Transformation Plans...
ON MONDAY, the BMA’s Annual Representative Meeting took a giant step forward when, after a struggle over the issue of STPs, it passed a motion moved on behalf of the London Region by Anna Athow for this Tory tool for smashing the NHS to ‘be abandoned’. There was in fact...
THE NUT and ATL teachers unions, and the FBU (Fire Brigades Union), yesterday accused the Tory Government of being ‘grossly irresponsible’ for having brought forward proposals to allow schools to be built without fire sprinklers, with combustible material used for cladding and large school compartments to be without sprinklers. Without...
A MOTION demanding the Tory NHS Sustainability and Transformation Plans (STPs) are ‘abandoned’ was passed with an overwhelming majority at the BMA’s Annual Representative Meeting (ARM) in Bournemouth on Monday. Agenda Committee motion 42 stated: ‘That this meeting condemns the woeful manner in which STPs have been progressed, turning them...
‘SCRAP the cap! Fair pay for nurses! Now!’ chanted over fifty nurses and Royal College of Nursing (RCN) officials outside the Department of Health in Whitehall yesterday. Nurses held up placards that read: ‘The government has taken £5,990 from my pay packet since 2010.’ They called on health secretary...
DESPITE all the recent words from Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, about the underlying health of British capitalism, his actions yesterday revealed that the Bank is, in fact, desperately trying to head off an imminent banking crash. Yesterday Carney ordered every bank in the country to put...
‘THE current freeze on housing benefit is pushing hundreds of thousands of private renters dangerously close to breaking point at a time when homelessness is rising,’ Graeme Brown, interim chief executive at Shelter, said on Monday. ‘For those hit by the freeze, housing benefit is failing to bridge the widening...
‘WE ARE asking members to support the major anti-cuts demonstration in central London on 1st July,’ civil servants union PCS said yesterday, referring to the ‘TORIES OUT’ march this Saturday. Labour Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell has called for the TUC to organise a million to join the march. PCS continued:...
LABOUR shadow chancellor John McDonnell has come out and said openly what the vast majority of people in the country believe – that those who died in the Grenfell Tower fire were ‘murdered’ by ‘political decisions’. Speaking at a debate on democracy held on Sunday at the Glastonbury Festival, McDonnell...
THE SOUTH African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU) has said that it is 100% in solidarity with its affiliate, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA), in their struggle to negotiate a new wage agreement in the engineering sector. This comes after NUMSA said last Wednesday that wage...
‘CASH-FOR-VOTES’ and ‘an outrageous straight bung’ were how SNP Leader in Westminster Ian Blackford and Wales First Minister Carwyn Jones described the Tory-DUP deal announced by Downing Street yesterday morning. Eighteen days after the election resulted in a hung parliament, the deal was signed for £1.5bn to be spent...
IT IS NOW becoming crystal clear that a concerted campaign by Labour right wingers to keep the disintegrating Tory minority government of Theresa May in power is underway under the pretext of negotiating a ‘soft’ Brexit. ‘Soft Brexit’ is the code for a plot to completely overturn the result of...
THE TORY ‘government has the NHS running on nothing but fumes’, warns British Medical Association (BMA) Council Chair Dr Mark Porter. Addressing doctors at the BMA’s Annual Representative Meeting (ARM) in Bournemouth, this morning Dr Porter will call on the government not to ignore concerns from patients and doctors about...
ISRAELI authorities last Friday returned the body of Bahaa Imad al-Hirbawi, a Palestinian who was killed by Israeli forces near Qalandiya checkpoint last Tuesday in the central occupied West Bank district of Ramallah. This was while the Israeli state continued to hold the bodies of three other Palestinians who were...
ON 6th June 2017 at the height of general election fever, senior NHS managers at NHS England (NHSE) and NHS Improvement (NHSI) were secretly preparing draconian cost cutting plans and discussing them with local STP leaders. The plans were outlined in ‘The Next Steps for the Five Year Forward View’...
YESTERDAY, Saudi Arabia issued a set of 13 wide-ranging demands to Qatar which it insists have to be met before the sanctions imposed on that country are lifted. The Saudi regime, along with its allies – the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt – imposed a blockade of Qatar two...
‘THE GOVERNMENT needs to take urgent action on supply teaching. Agencies have been ripping off schools for years and have no place in the education system,’ Kevin Courtney, General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers will tell the annual NUT Supply Teacher Conference taking place today. Addressing the conference...
‘MANY in the fire service and the fire safety sector have been raising issues about regulation, issues like cladding, for many years and we constantly run into a brick wall from a government which is obsessed with deregulating, with reducing what they describe as red tape.’ Fire Brigades Union General...
THE SPLIT in the leading bodies of the Bank of England over whether or not to raise interest rates has emerged just shortly after the decision to keep them at the historic low of 0.25%. The contradiction in which they are caught is that even a slight increase will plunge...
OVER 300 people marched from Shepherd’s Bush to Parliament Wednesday lunchtime following last week’s Grenfell Tower fire disaster. ‘We know the government is guilty,’ declared Karen Boyle at an impromptu rally before the march set off. We know May has lost her majority, the DUP has backed down,’ she added...
THE QUEEN dropped by Westminster on her way to Ascot races yesterday morning to spend 20 minutes outlining the Theresa May minority Tory government’s legislative programme. All the key Tory Party manifesto pledges on the dementia tax, restoring grammar schools and foxhunting, along with ending the triple lock on pensions,...
SOUTH AFRICAN mining company Sibanye Gold has fired around 1,500 workers for taking part in a wildcat strike at its Cooke mine. The decision, announced last Thursday, 16 June, prompted an angry reaction from the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). Workers at the mine downed tools over two weeks...
‘MY GOVERNMENT’S priority is to secure the best possible deal as the country leaves the European Union,’ the Queen said yesterday, outlining the Tory party’s proposed programme. The main pillars of the Tory party election manifesto which lost them the general election were not mentioned in the Queen’s Speech. The...
YESTERDAY afternoon, when asked if Labour has plans to form a coalition to topple the government following the Queen’s speech today, Labour shadow chancellor John McDonnell replied: ‘No, no we are not into any discussions or anything like that about alliances or coalitions or whatever... ‘We will put forward what...
SYRIA’S Permanent Representative to the UN in Geneva, Ambassador Hussam Eddin Ala, affirmed on Monday that the Israeli violations of international humanitarian law and the fundamental rights of the Palestinian people and of the people of the occupied Syrian Golan are systematic discriminatory practices. They are violations of the legal...
THE TIME is not right for an interest rate rise, Bank of England governor Mark Carney said at the Mansion House. In his speech, Carney said: ‘From my perspective, given the mixed signals on consumer spending and business investment, and given the still subdued domestic inflationary pressures, in particular anaemic...
FRENCH President Emmanuel Macron’s party, La République en Marche, has won a parliamentary majority, just weeks after his presidential victory. With nearly all the votes counted, his party alongside its MoDem allies, won more than 300 seats in the 577-seat National Assembly. It will however turn out to be a...
ISRAELI police stormed the al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem on Sunday morning, right after worshippers at the site were protesting against the provocative visit of a group of Jewish settlers to the Islamic holy site. Israeli police reportedly attacked with teargas and toxic gas canisters the protesting worshippers as well...
THE May government has now entered the world of the surreal. It has just about been able to schedule a Queen’s Speech of sorts for this Wednesday, but is still without the guaranteed support of the DUP to try to ensure that it survives the confidence vote at the...
AN ANGRY demonstration of 2,000 demanding ‘Justice for Grenfell’ marched through central London on Friday night. The protest began at the Department for Communities and Local Government in Marsham Street before marching to demonstrate outside Downing Street shouting ‘May must go’ and ‘Justice for Grenfell, No Justice No Peace’. A number...
SHADOW chancellor John McDonnell yesterday slammed the May government’s ‘catastrophic failure’ after the fatal Grenfell Tower fire. Both he and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn demanded the government pass emergency legislation to requisition empty flats to house the homeless families. Speaking on Sky’s Sophy Ridge on Sunday, McDonnell said that councils...
SEVENTY six people are still unaccounted for after the Grenfell Tower inferno, police confirmed yesterday and also that criminal proceedings have begun to investigate those responsible. Met Police Commander Cundy said: ‘We as the police have started an investigation... The investigation will look into what criminal offences may have been...
THREE union representatives at the Ritzy cinema in Brixton have been dismissed by Picturehouse in a move described by their trade union BECTU as trade union dismissals. A fourth representative has received a final written warning. BECTU, a sector of the 140,000 strong Prospect union, has warned that management’s action,...
LIFE as far as private contractors are concerned is cheap! It emerged yesterday that private contractors that refurbished Grenfell Tower a year before it burst into flames decided to use a cheaper cladding on the outside of the building which was not fire-proof. For just £5,000 more the private contractors could...
THE fire that spread like an inferno through the Grenfell Tower block early Wednesday morning has claimed the lives of at least 17 people so far with the death toll expected to rise dramatically as work begins to sift through the remains of the 24-storey council owned flats. It was...
AFTER Israel decided to drastically cut electricity supplies to the Gaza Strip, UN Humanitarian Coordinator in the occupied Palestinian territory, Robert Piper, characterised the ever-worsening crisis in Gaza as ‘an internal Palestinian dispute’ – as Israel’s military blockade on the coastal enclave marked its 10th anniversary this...
‘THE TRUTH must come out and it will,’ Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said yesterday afternoon as the number who died in the Grenfell Tower inferno rose to 17. After visiting the aid centres set up by the local communities and run by local volunteers Corbyn said: ‘Some very hard questions...