Monthly Archives: January 2018
PRESIDENT Trump’s racist comments, made while speaking privately to US lawmakers in the Oval Office on Thursday, in fact show a bourgeois leader who is frightened of the masses of the world and actually wants to hide away from them in his ‘Fortress America’, complete with its high walls...
‘EMERGENCY care is itself in a state of emergency,’ Dr Taj Hassan, President of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine said on Thursday. He was responding to new A&E figures published by NHS England showing the true extent of the winter crisis which the NHS is currently in the middle...
EX-UKIP leader Nigel Farage has said that ‘we should have a second referendum on EU membership.’ This is the biggest personal surrender note for many years in the UK. The issue of a second referendum is crystal clear: Parliament voted that the people should decide whether the UK would leave...
JUNIOR doctors have received back pay of £800,000 after a hard-fought battle against their trust regarding a contract breach. Their union, the British Medical Association (BMA), said: ‘It brings to an end a two-year dispute in which the Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals NHS Trust refused to accept that...
TORY health secretary Jeremy Hunt has been told in a letter from NHS bosses that the NHS is ‘no longer able to meet the standards in its constitution’ and stands at a ‘watershed moment’. They are saying it is redundant! The letter from Chris Hopkins, chief executive of NHS Providers,...
SENIOR doctors in charge of more than 60 hospital emergency departments have written to the prime minister warning of ‘very serious concerns’ about patient safety amid the winter crisis, including a case of patients dying prematurely in corridors. The letter, dated 10 January, says waiting time performance in some departments...
ON a classroom whiteboard in the battered city of Mosul the words ‘rediscovering how to smile’ outline the heartbreaking task of Iraqi teachers striving to heal their students’ mental scars after brutal Islamic State group rule. Dozens of Iraqi teachers, many battling trauma themselves, have gathered at a university...
TRAIN staff and angry commuters have been protesting up and down the country at the 3.4% hikes in rail fares. Many commuters have seen their season tickets go up by more than £100. Many families have been driven out of London because of spiralling rents, others have experienced a...
VIOLENT protests broke out in at least ten towns in Tunisia on Monday evening as demonstrations over rising prices and tax increases spread throughout the North African country. A man was killed during a protest against government austerity measures in Tebourba, 40 km (25 miles) west of the capital...
LACK of sleep resulting from long hours and excessive workloads is jeopardising patient safety and doctors’ health, the BMA has warned, while reports emerged of doctors and nurses crashing their cars on the way home after long shifts because they are dog tired. A report produced by the...
MAY’S ‘reshuffle’ that never was continues her recent career in which everything that could go wrong has, but such is the feebleness of the Labour opposition she and her government survive. In the 2016 EU referendum campaign she was on the losing side, but survived to be appointed Tory...
THERE are two million child workers in Turkey, despite the official statistics showing the figure as 800,000, DISK (The Confederation of Revolutionist Worker’s Unions), said in a statement. Last Friday DISK organised a demonstration in front of the Directorate of Social Security in Istanbul’s Fındıklı district, the newspaper Cumhuriyet reported...
SAUDI Arabians have taken to the social networking services, venting their anger at the government for hiking domestic gas prices and introducing value added tax (VAT). London-based Al-Quds Al-Arabi paper said on Sunday that furious Saudi citizens had created a ‘salary is not enough’ hashtag on Twitter. According to various...
THE right-wing think tank the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), which promotes free-market capitalism, has just produced a report entitled ‘An NHS Royal Commission – from fighting fires to lasting settlement.’ This report, written by Tory peer Maurice Saatchi, famous as Margaret Thatcher’s favourite PR man, calls for the...
ON FRIDAY the GMB trade union declared that ‘Tory Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt must resign,’ and warned that that the ‘NHS is tailspinning into catastrophe.’ The GMB treated the NHS crisis as if Health Secretary Hunt had the sole responsibility for it. The GMB said: ‘Everyone apart from the Health...
LABOUR’S shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth yesterday hit out at Tory cuts, saying the NHS winter crisis ‘was entirely predictable and indeed entirely preventable.’ He told Andrew Marr: ‘We’re now in the eighth year of tight austerity on NHS finances ‘We’ve seen community health services cut back, we’ve seen a reduction...
HEZBOLLAH leader, Sayyed Nasrallah, has said that Israel may start a war in the region and that Hezbollah is fully prepared for it. In an interview with pan-Arab al-Mayadeen TV, Nasrallah clarified that the recent protests in Iran were sparked by economic factors and that external forces were seeking to...
A WAR on homeless people has begun, with moves to make begging illegal, effectively criminalising poverty, while using the police to drive homeless people out of ‘royal’ Windsor, and then presumably out of all towns and cities. Tory Councillor Simon Dudley, of the Royal Borough of Windsor & Maidenhead has...
AUSTRALIA’S Federal Government has quietly decided to freeze university funding for regional nursing and other students, warns Queensland Nurses and Midwives’ Union (QNMU). In a decision made without consultation or a Senate vote, the Turnbull Government recently froze funding for university placements and effectively put an end to the career...
A NUMBER of Palestinians were shot and injured by Israeli forces, including a critical injury, during clashes in the Ramallah-district village of Deir Nitham village and Bethlehem-district camp of Duheisha on Friday. Israeli forces suppressed the funeral procession of 16-year-old Palestinian teen Musaab al-Tamimi in Deir Nitham and raided Duheisha...
TORY Health secretary Jeremy Hunt must resign, trade union GMB demanded yesterday, while warning that the ‘NHS is tailspinning into catastrophe.’ ‘The number of hospitals turning sick people away has dramatically increased,’ GMB said, warning: ‘This is putting lives at risk.’ Kevin Brandstatter, GMB National Officer for the NHS, said:...
THE MASSIVE gap in wealth between workers and the bosses has once again been highlighted in a new report which shows that the chief executives of the top 100 companies in the country are paid on average 265 times what a worker on the minimum wage earns. The analysis of...
‘THIS IS dangerous nonsense and must be opposed by the whole trade union movement,’ RMT General Secretary Mick Cash said yesterday responding to a reactionary statement by the Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) which claimed that increases in the minimum wage drive up unemployment through automation – workers...
SOCIAL WORK managers in Renfrewshire in Scotland have spent almost £4 million on agency care staff in just five years, figures reveal. Renfrewshire Health and Social Care Partnership (HSCP) said it does not know how many agency workers have been used in children’s and adult support services. The money is...
NEW FIGURES exposing the escalating winter crisis in the NHS were published yesterday morning by NHS England, forcing Tory PM May to apologise for the first time. In the last week of 2017, 16,900 patients were stuck languishing in the back of ambulances waiting in a queue outside hospitals up...
DR RICHARD Fawcett, a Royal Stoke Hospital consultant, has apologised for ‘third world’ conditions in the hospital’s A&E, saying that he was ‘heartbroken’ to see frail and elderly patients waiting in corridors ‘for hours’ due to overcrowding. Waits of more than ten hours have been reported over the Christmas period...
MULTI-BILLIONAIRE Richard Branson’s private health company Virgin Care has won £1bn worth of NHS contracts in a single year. Private providers are winning an increasing number NHS contracts, with Virgin Care taking the lion’s share of NHS contracts in the last year. A data analysis by pressure group NHS Support...
IT WAS announced on Tuesday night that all operations during the month of January are cancelled, leaving over 50,000 patients in pain and misery. Also on Tuesday, an A&E doctor issued an apology for the NHS having reached ‘third world conditions’, with patients spending hours lying on trolleys in corridors....
TRAIN staff were joined by angry commuters in protests at over forty stations across the UK as the 3.4% hikes in rail fares came into force yesterday morning, with rail union RMT declaring that the only solution is the complete re-nationalisation of the entire rail network. The massive hike...
PALESTINE President Mahmoud Abbas said on Monday that he is going to make important decisions in 2018 holding Israel to account for its grave and systematic violations of international law. Abbas’ statement came in response to the decision of the ruling Israeli party, Likud, to annex the Israeli settlements...
THE Palestinian National Council (PNC), the Palestinian parliament in exile, said on Monday that the decision of the Israeli ruling Likud party to impose Israeli law on the illegal West Bank settlements is an open war against the Palestinian people and their inalienable rights. Its speaker, Salim Zanoun, said: ‘The...
CALL an ambulance and a fire engine turns up! Firefighters with just six days basic first aid training are being sent to medical emergencies instead of ambulances. This happened on over 44,000 occasions last year and included patients suffering from heart attacks and strokes. Crews dealt with 44,121 call-outs last year...
FORMER Irish prime minister Charles Haughey was told by loyalist paramilitaries 30 years ago that MI5 had ordered his assassination, declassified state papers show. Records from his office while he was taoiseach in 1987 reveal that the UVF wrote to him to tell him that British intelligence also launched a...
NURSES and GPs in County Durham are being told to act as first responders ahead of ambulances as North-East paramedics struggle to cope with soaring demand. Local MPs have branded the move by clinical commissioning groups (CCG) in County Durham as ‘desperate measures,’ while a councillor said people in rural...
‘CLEARLY the fact that there were no sprinklers had its affect,’ Chief Fire Officer of Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service, Dan Stephens said yesterday. He was speaking in the wake of an inferno which engulfed a multi-storey car park in Liverpool on New Year’s Eve. The fire in King’s Dock...
IN HIS New Year speech North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un warned US imperialism not to start a nuclear war against the country saying that a nuclear launch button is ‘always on my table’. Jong-un said: ‘We achieved the goal of completing our state nuclear force in 2017. We need to...