Monthly Archives: August 2017
OFFICIAL figures released today by the Office of National Statistics (ONS) show what every working person in the country knows, that prices in all the basic commodities necessary for life are shooting up while wages are being cut. The statistics show that inflation in the UK is steadily rising, since...
MORE than nine in ten of England’s 50 largest NHS hospital trusts are not staffed with nurses to the level planned by their own management, warns the Royal College of Nursing (RCN). RCN analysis confirms that hospitals are putting more unregistered support staff on shift to cope with the shortage...
US PRESIDENT Trump, dedicated to ‘making America great again’, to further enrich the bosses and the bankers at the expense of the US workers and the workers of the world, is now well into his war on two fronts. At home he is seeking to wipe out all healthcare...
JOBCENTRE workers in Sheffield launch their two-week strike this morning, stepping up their action against the planned closure which the Public and Commercial Services union (PCS) rightfully insist will have a devastating impact on the workers and job seekers alike. The union’s 50 members at Eastern Avenue jobcentre are campaigning...
THE South African Municipal Workers Union (Samwu) held a demonstration on Thursday marching to the Midvaal Municipal offices, south of Johannesburg, in protest against working conditions and to deliver a memorandum of demands. Samwu’s spokesperson, Papikie Mohale, said the protest march followed numerous grievances which have been raised with the...
LONDON Mayor Sadiq Khan says Londoners have been let down after the Tory government rejected his request for new firefighting equipment. Tory Home Secretary Amber Rudd turned down the Labour mayor’s £6 million bid for aerial ladders, drones and 1,200 breathing apparatus kits for firefighters following the Grenfell Tower inferno. He...
HUNDREDS of Peckham, southeast London, tenants living in tower blocks on the Southwark Council’s Ledbury Estate are being moved out after safety checks carried out following the Grenfell Tower fire found the buildings had been at risk of collapse for decades. It has been assessed that the four 13-storey...
DETAILS of the secret Tory plan for a ‘fire sale’ of NHS land and buildings emerged yesterday following an analysis carried out for the Labour Party of Department of Health data on NHS-owned land ‘deemed surplus’ and therefore ripe for flogging off to property speculators and developers from...
LOUD and angry protests will again be held outside the AGM of British mining company Vedanta Resources’ AGM at the Lincoln Centre, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London at 2pm on Monday 14th August. The demonstrators are accusing the company of major environmental and human rights abuses across its operations. Parallel protests...
LABOUR has accused the May government of a ‘blanket sell-off’ of NHS land to raise billions to try to plug the hole in savagely cut NHS finances. The party’s analysis of NHS Digital data, about the multi-billion sell-off, found that 117 of the sites deemed surplus to requirements are still...
THE LEADER of the Royal College of Nursing yesterday poured scorn on Tory government claims to be increasing the NHS workforce by 10,000 nurses and 1,500 doctors a year. RCN Chief Executive and General Secretary Janet Davies insisted: ‘It’s unclear where extra nursing students will come from when the removal...
SPEAKING in New Jersey, President Trump has delivered a final warning to North Korea. He said that, ‘North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States.’ He added that the North Korean leader ‘has been very threatening beyond a normal state … As I said, they will...
A FRENCH farmer hailed as a hero by campaigners for helping refugees enter France ‘illegally’ has been given a four-month suspended jail sentence, after prosecutors argued that an earlier suspended fine was too lenient. Cédric Herrou was sentenced by an appeal court in Aix-en-Provence, near Marseille in the south of...
ISRAEL is seeking to close Qatar-based broadcaster Al Jazeera’s offices in Jerusalem and revoke its journalists’ media credentials. The Israeli terrorist government’s Communications Minister, Ayoub Kara, alleged that the channel supported terrorism, and said both its Arabic and English-language channels would be taken off air. The Israeli government admitted that...
THE United Nations has strongly condemned the latest Saudi airstrikes against Yemen in which at least 12 civilians, including children, were killed, stressing that they are an example of the ‘brutality’ of the Yemeni conflict and ‘disregard’ for civilians’ safety. ‘All parties to the conflict continue to show a disregard...
NEARLY half of England’s maternity units were forced to close to new mothers at some point during 2016 because of severe funding cuts, the closure of maternity services up and down the country and a shortage of 3,500 midwives, data obtained by Labour under the Freedom of Information Act...
IN A speech on Saturday evening, Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas called Jerusalem ‘the eternal capital of the state of Palestine and nothing else.’ Addressing hundreds of Jerusalemite Palestinians in the presidential headquarters in Ramallah, official Palestinian news agency Wafa quoted Abbas as saying that the ‘Palestinian leadership listened...
ON SUNDAY the Guardian newspaper published a letter signed by 30 Labour MPs and the one Green Party MP expressing their concern about the proposed roll-out of Universal Credit (UC) in their constituencies during November and December this year. They wrote: ‘There is a real worry that the introduction of...
‘WE WILL not have a Wild West situation,’ for drivers, Steve Garelick, GMB branch secretary for professional drivers for London, said yesterday. He spoke to News Line as in excess of 40 black cabs descended on Brighton Town Hall as part of an escalating campaign against app-driver companies undercutting...
RAIL union RMT yesterday slammed the government and private rail companies after it emerged that passengers facing delays and cancellations – because of the planned huge refurbishment at London’s Waterloo station – will not get compensation. More than half of Waterloo station will be closed down over the summer, bringing...
LIBERAL leader Cable yesterday launched a vicious attack on the elderly stating that by voting Brexit they had ‘comprehensively shafted the young’. Writing in the Mail on Sunday, Cable accused the over-65s of being ‘self-declared martyrs’ who claim leaving the EU is worth the cost. He said: ‘The martyrdom of...
THE FIREFIGHTERS’ union’s submission to the Grenfell Tower fire inquiry demands that cuts to the fire service must be examined to establish the impact that they had on the disaster and whether lives were lost as a result. The deadline passed at 5pm on Friday for local residents and...
‘WE HAVE been strong and we are not prepared to be walked over and we do want answers,’ Grenfell survivor Jaquie Hayes said yesterday. She spoke as the deadline passed at 5pm yesterday for local residents and organisations to submit evidence to the inquiry into the fire which claimed the...
RASHAN Jermaine Charles died after being arrested by the police in the early hours of Saturday morning, July 22 on Kingsland Road, Hackney, east London. He was only 20 years old. Just a month earlier another young black man, Edir Frederico da Costa, also known as Edson, died six...
‘WE are not quitting until we are winning! We will keep on striking until we win,’ Unite member and Serco worker Yomi Sogbesan told News Line on the picket line outside Whipps Cross Hospital yesterday on day 11 of their two-week strike. Waltham Forest Council Unite branch came down to...
YESTERDAY striking Serco workers from Bart’s NHS Trust, striking BA mixed fleet cabin crew, and striking Bank of England workers marched and picketed the Serco shareholders meeting at 8am, the Civil Aviation Authority at 11am and finally the Bank of England at 1pm. Their struggles are for wage rises and...
ADALAH, the Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, and Al-Marsad Arab Human Rights Centre in the Golan Heights, sent a letter to senior Israeli military officials on 30 July demanding that they evacuate Israeli military outposts and minefields from the occupied Syrian town of Majdal Shams located...
THREE sets of strikers fighting low pay came together at the Bank of England yesterday lunchtime. The morning began at 8am outside JP Morgan new Blackfriars, where auxiliary workers employed by Serco at four Bart’s Health NHS Trust hospitals lobbied the Serco shareholders meeting there. The Serco strikers were joined...
TOWER block tenants on Camden Council’s Chalcots estate in north London are angry at the ‘shoddy’ safety measures carried out since they were ordered to leave their homes at 24-hours notice following the Grenfell fire on 14th June. The 3,000 tenants of the four tower blocks on the Chalcots estate...
‘THERE needs to be a national demonstration. British Airways, the Bank of England, and Serco workers, we are all on strike because we have rejected a 1% pay rise. ‘Even the nurses said that they are going on strike soon against 1%,’ Unite member Bright Ephraim told News Line yesterday...
THE LABOUR Party yesterday called the revelation that 1,652 properties in North Kensington are unoccupied ‘simply unacceptable’. A local resident and community activist told News Line that he agreed with the statement made by Labour leader Corbyn immediately after the fire on 14th June, when he said that empty properties...
THE HORROR felt by millions of workers after the Grenfell Tower inferno which claimed the lives of many men, women and children rapidly turned to anger in the hours and days after the fire as it emerged that the disaster was man-made, and that cheap non-fireproof...
BRITISH Gas is to increase electricity prices by 12.5% from 15 September, Centrica has revealed, in a move that will drastically slash the living standards of its 3.1 million customers. Its average household fuel bill will rise by £76 to £1,120, up by 7.3%. Centrica said the rise was a...
OVER 700 ground crew workers at Pearson International Airport, Toronto, Canada’s busiest airport, have been on strike since 9.30pm last Thursday evening, after their employer, Swissport, imposed a pay and conditions cutting contract on them, having brought in 250 ‘temporary workers’ in May. The situation is very reminiscent of the...
STAFF at the Bank of England kicked off their three-day strike yesterday with a big picket and demonstration addressed by Labour shadow chancellor John McDonnell. This is the first time in 50 years that the BofE have had a strike, and although the action involves around two per cent of...
PATIENTS, nurses, doctors and other hospital staff stopped to support the striking Serco workers on their picket line outside the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel yesterday, on day eight of their two week long strike. Cleaners, catering staff, porters and security staff blew whistles and shouted ‘Low pay – No...
THE PALESTINIAN Authority has decided to uphold a freeze on security coordination with Israel that was imposed during protests against now-removed Israeli security measures at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem, a high-ranking Fatah official has said. While a civil disobedience campaign launched by Palestinians in Jerusalem succeeded...
THE BATTLE of Passchendaele saw 275,000 British soldiers, workers in uniform, killed or wounded alongside 220,000 German workers in uniform. This was a great imperialist slaughter directed by Anglo-French and German imperialism to re-divide the world between themselves. The general staffs and the governments involved fought resolutely and determinedly down...
THE SERCO workers marked the beginning of the second week of their two-week strike yesterday with a lively picket line outside the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel, east London There were also big picket lines at the other three hospitals where the Serco workers are on strike: Whipps Cross in...