Monthly Archives: September 2017
THE insulation used at Grenfell Tower – which releases cyanide if burned – is installed at sheltered accommodation in east London, it was reported yesterday. Celotex RS5000 foam was withdrawn from sale after the Grenfell fire, in which victims suffered cyanide poisoning, but the product is used at 34 homes...
The officer who restrained 20-year-old Rashan Charles in Dalston, East London shortly before he died on July 22 is being investigated for gross misconduct. Rashan died after being held on the ground by Metropolitan Police officers after entering a shop in the area. His death sparked a number of angry...
OPENING the public sector pay debate at the 149th Trades Union Congress in Brighton on Monday afternoon, Unison general secretary Dave Prentis moved composite 9, Public Sector Pay. He said: ‘For millions of public service workers struggling to survive, there is no more pressing issue than lifting the pay cap....
LABOUR leader Jeremy Corbyn yesterday at the TUC conference had no answer to the Tory onslaught on the trade unions. In particular, he ignored the way that the Tories made minor below inflation pay awards to the police and the prison officers yesterday afternoon – while Congress was sitting –...
THE ultra fragility of the May government has been underlined by the fact that its attempts to stay in office via a £1bn payment to the DUP has now been legally challenged by the heroine of the pro-EU bosses and bankers, Gina Miller. After her latest legal challenge the government...
THE first session of the TUC Congress, on Sunday afternoon in Brighton saw a division over the General Council statement on Brexit and Composite 7 on free movement. Dave Ward of the CWU said ‘reluctantly we are going to oppose Composite 7.’ He said: ‘We’d like to see us starting...
THE TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady yesterday welcomed six emergency workers to Congress who had been involved in the Manchester, Westminster and Finsbury Park attacks and the Grenfell fire. Three of the workers addressed congress. Jo, a nurse at Stockport Hospital, paid tribute to fellow workers who came into...
‘YOUTH demand a future! No Zero hour contracts!’ shouted the fifty-strong Young Socialists and Workers Revolutionary Party lobby of the Trades Union Congress in Brighton yesterday morning. Delegates stopped to talk to YS members who demanded that the TUC call a general strike to bring the government down. The YS...
THE Hospital Consultants and Specialists association (HCSA) is warning of the impact on patient care as Hospital Doctors are ‘shut out’ of the secret STP process. HCSA called today for a shake-up of the Sustainability and Transformation Plan (STP) process in England’s NHS after research showed major concerns among...
THE TUC meets in Brighton this week for its most vital Congress in living memory. It meets at a time when the working class throughout the country are sick to death of the never ending austerity attacks by the Tories, attacks that are driving them back to the living...
A NEW SURVEY, Refugees without refuge, published by the Refugee Council on Friday, has found high levels of homelessness and destitution among refugees shortly after they have been granted their refugee status. As government support is rapidly cut off after somebody receives status, refugees can find themselves homeless, forced to...
ONE hundred and forty staff working at Manchester University have been threatened with the sack prompting their union, the University and College Union (UCU) to open a ballot for strike action against this massive attack. UCU says there is no economic rationale for job cuts on such an...
MEXICO’S main teachers’ union has defended Venezuela against US President Trump’s threats of military action. In a formal statement, the Oaxaca branch of the Mexican National Educational Workers Union, CNTE, criticised the United States for ‘violating’ Venezuela’s sovereignty and issued a declaration in support of the Venezuelan government. The CNTE declaration...
THE DIVISIONS within the Tory Party are rapidly sharpening, with an ever widening gulf between those who want to remain in the EU and those who want to leave. The Tory Party is collapsing. As many as forty pro-Brexit Tory MPs have signed a letter which states that Britain...
ISRAELI forces detained at least 14 Palestinians during raids in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem before dawn on Wednesday, with one family reporting being violently assaulted by Israeli soldiers during a raid to detain a young man who was not in the house, according to Palestinian sources. Local...
A PLAN by the Tories to demonstrate that the bosses of Britain’s leading companies are firmly behind the chaotic Brexit negotiations blew up in their faces this week and exposed the splits and divisions at the very centre of the capitalist class. A letter from the government was sent to...
‘STOP working with Israeli torturers,’ Palestinians urge European Union (EU) academics. Palestinian academics are urging their European counterparts to end their cooperation with a European Union project that funds Israeli torturers. Palestinian workers’ unions, academics and campaign groups have called on Belgium’s KU Leuven university and Portugal’s INESC-ID research institute...
THE Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has blurted out the truth that has been more than obvious for a number of years to millions of workers – that the UK capitalist economy is broken. The reason that he has breached his vow of silence on the issue is that the...
‘SCRAP the cap!’ shouted thousands of nurses from all over the UK rallying in Parliament Square yesterday. The rally was organised by the Royal College of Nursing, which has warned it is prepared to ballot nurses for strike action to break the 1% public sector pay cap. A recent RCN survey...
SPEAKING at the Brics Group (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) conference in China, President Putin said of the North Koreans: ‘They’d rather eat grass than give up their nuclear programme.’ Putin was explaining why the pursuit of further sanctions against North Korea is ‘useless’. He also warned that...
THE PALESTINIAN resistance movement of Hamas has denounced the Israeli shooting of a Palestinian, Raed al-Salihi, who died later in detention as a ‘new multi-dimensional crime.’ First, the Israelis shot the young man, then there were accusations of ‘medical negligence’ – not providing the dying Palestinian with adequate medical...
WORLD capitalism is on the verge of an even bigger, catastrophic economic collapse and there is absolutely nothing the central banks or governments can do to stop it. This is the message that is being put out clearly by the most powerful financial institutions in America, the Federal Reserve and...
HEBRON governor Kamel Hameed on Saturday said the Israeli army’s decision to expand municipal powers of illegal settlers in the city of Hebron as ‘the most dangerous since 1967’. He told the official radio station ‘Voice of Palestine’ that the decision is paving the way for undermining Palestinian authority and...
WORKERS at McDonald’s went on strike on Monday for the first time since the burger bar came to the UK in 1974. About 40 workers from two restaurants in Cambridge and Crayford, south-east London, began a 24-hour strike yesterday over low wages, zero-hours contracts and the refusal of McDonald’s to recognise their...
LOCAL Miami cooks and cashiers from McDonald’s, Burger King and other restaurants announced they are walking off the job on America’s Labor Day, today, joining strikes by fast-food workers in 300 cities from coast to coast. Miami workers in the Fight for $15 stressed their demand not just for $15...
NORTH Korea has successfully tested an H-bomb, a nuclear weapon that it will now be able to load onto an Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile (ICBM), able to target the USA. It has made perfectly clear that its sixth nuclear test was a ‘perfect success’, and that it had tested a...
THE UN has slammed the UK, which it says has violated the Convention on Disabled People’s Rights. A damning UN report released yesterday states that the Tories have created a ‘human catastrophe’ for disabled people. Theresia Degener, the UN committee chair told the UK government: ‘Social cut policies have led...
BMA DOCTORS want urgent action to tackle poverty and improve public health services after an official report found a strong connection between deprivation and preventable deaths in England and Wales. The link was made in an ONS (Office for National Statistics) report, released this week, which examined avoidable deaths across...
WORKERS at the South Korean broadcaster MBC go on strike from Monday joining 1,130 KBS producers who stopped working on Thursday. They are calling for the network’s top management to step down for allegedly influencing news coverage to be in favour of former president Park Geun Hye’s administration. Among the...
THE GIGANTIC farce of the Brexit negotiations hit a brick wall this week with EU officials accusing the British of failing to reveal its hand over how much money they are prepared to pay the EU for the privilege of leaving, and the UK negotiators hitting back, claiming that...
CINEMA workers demanding the Living Wage have overwhelmingly re-newed their mandate for strike action, their union BECTU announced yesterday. Cinema workers at selected Picturehouse Cinemas have voted in huge numbers to continue their strike. At the Ritzy cinema in Brixton 77% of members took part in the August ballot...
