Monthly Archives: February 2018
THE ISRAELI ruling class has been shocked by Syrian missile defences being able to, and Syria having the audacity to, shoot down a US-supplied Israeli F-16 fighter that was attacking its people and its territory and had previously been invulnerable over the skies of the Arab Republic. The Israeli...
WARRING TORY Cabinet Ministers are set to deliver a series of speeches on the ‘road to Brexit’ culminating with one by PM May within the next three weeks. Security, the devolution of powers, workers’ rights and trade are to be covered. This comes against a background of a divided Tory...
THE ONLY way to stop the nationwide shutdown of almost every university in the country, beginning on Thursday 22nd February, is for university management to stop the attack on our pensions. This is the message from the general secretary of the University and College Union (UCU) demanded at a...
LAST Monday, the American Dow Jones Index, which records the share prices of the top US companies and banks, recorded the biggest drop in one day in share prices in history, a massive fall of 1,175 points. This dramatic plunge was repeated in stock exchanges across Europe, Asia and Australia...
‘ASKING students to work for free is exploitation. Companies which are employing young graduates for free must be threatened with legal action against them,’ Francis Ahanonu President of Coventry University Students Union told News Line yesterday. He was speaking after the Tory government sent out 550 ‘warning letters’ to...
IN TENNESSEE, an inspiring victory against the outsourcing of all state facilities service jobs has been won under the leadership of the small campus union of the University of Tennessee (UT), United Campus Workers, UCW-CWA. Over the course of 27 months, UCW designed strategies that relied on and nurtured the...
SINCE Universal Credit was devised over seven years ago, the Tories have gone to great lengths to keep from the public exactly how it is working. Universal Credit was ‘sold’ by the then-welfare minister Tory Iain Duncan Smith as a simplification of the benefit system rolling six major benefits,...
THE HIGH Court has given the council the go-ahead to privatise Haringey’s housing, allowing huge private developers to embark on a £2bn private housing scheme in the teeth of fierce opposition from the local community. One thousand angry residents marched through north London to the Civic Centre in Wood Green...
THE FIGHT for Justice for every single man, woman and child who died in the Grenfell Tower and their families and the survivors who are still languishing in hotels almost eight months after the tragic fire is now spreading across the nation. For the first time, next Wednesday, Manchester and...
HUNDREDS of protesters endured the cold on Sunday at a People’s Tribunal to hold the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) accountable for its culture of secrecy and systemic abuse and to support those in detention at the Northwest Detention Centre in Tacoma, north east of Seattle. The campaign comes...
THE TORY policy of forcing every school in England to become academies and turn the entire education system into a profit-making business has created a massive crisis that threatens to bankrupt schools throughout the country. This is clear following recent investigations into the finances of the dominant multi-academy chains (MATs)...
WALL Street suffered the largest one-day collapse in history on Monday, triggering the Asian markets to crash, followed by the European and the UK markets yesterday. When the US Dow Jones re-opened yesterday afternoon (New York time 9:30am) the US stocks dropped even further by another 2.1%, losing 500...
Venezuela’s National Constituent Assembly (ANC) passed a new law last week aimed at empowering the organised working class. The Constitutional Law of Workers’ Productive Councils (CPTT) was a product of the ANC’s Workers’ Commission and was drawn up as part of a broad consultation process. ‘It’s time for socialism,’ stated President...
ON MONDAY the Wall Street stock market crashed with the Dow Jones Index, which follows the fortunes of 30 large US companies on a daily basis, recording a massive drop of 1.175 points. This may sound a small amount but it represents the largest one day fall in the history...
THE Palestinian Arabic dailies highlighted on Sunday the news about the Palestinian youth who was shot dead by Israeli forces during clashes in Jenin in the occupied West Bank. Al-Quds, al-Ayyam and al-Hayat al-Jadida said Ahmad Samir Abu Obeid, 19, from the city of Jenin, was shot in the head...
A REPORT in yesterday’s Guardian newspaper brought home the deadly reality experienced by workers in the gig economy that now dominates British capitalism. 53-year-old Don Lane, who suffered from severe diabetes and worked for DPD parcel delivery firm, collapsed and died after being forced to miss appointments with a specialist...
‘ONCE the funding of health and social care are combined, then the door is opened for means testing and charging for healthcare,’ Anna Athow, deputy chair London region BMA, said yesterday responding to calls to ‘change the way the NHS is funded’. Liberal Democrat leader Vince Cable yesterday, called for...
MORE than 20,000 nurses, health workers, trade unionists, workers, students and youth marched on Downing Street on Saturday afternoon to demand TUC action to defend the NHS and kick the Tories out now! The front of the march was dominated by nurses who chanted: ‘What do we want? More...
PRESIDENT Trump and his military chiefs believe the US’ nuclear weapons are seen as too big to be used, and that this means that the US is not being taken seriously enough. It is therefore determined to develop low-yield bombs, that could take out entire cities, and be the opening...
TORY government plans to boost the number of trainee nurses in the wake of the Francis report into Mid Staffs are failing, the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) warns on the fifth anniversary of the landmark inquiry. A further fall in would-be nurses starting training can be expected this September...
AFTER the horror of Grenfell Tower fire, where so many men, women and children burned to death, the big issue is ‘is anyone safe in their homes under British capitalism?’ We know that over 300 tower blocks have the same flammable cladding as Grenfell Tower and only three have had...
THE DECISION to renew the detention of Amnesty International’s Turkey Chair just hours after a court ordered his release must be immediately reversed and Taner Kiliç set free, Amnesty International said on Thursday. Salil Shetty, Amnesty’s Secretary General, said: ‘Over the last 24 hours, we have borne witness to a...
THOUSANDS of nursing staff from across England will join tens of thousands of workers and youth on a march and demonstration in London today. Royal College of Nursing members will support campaigners, other unions and patient groups as part of the ‘NHS in crisis: Fix it now’ event. Activists will...
‘THIS NEWS is extremely concerning, but not altogether surprising considering the continued warnings the BMA has given over Capita’s shambolic running of backroom services in GP practices throughout the country.’ Dr Richard Vautrey, BMA GP committee chair, was responding to Capita’s share price dropping 40 per cent in early trading...
STRIKING Village School teachers were in high spirits, yesterday, the third day of their action to stop their school being turned into an academy. Pickets outside the school in Kingsbury, northwest London, were singing: ‘We shall overcome – no academy for us!’ National Education Union NUT section president Louise Regan told...
‘ON EVERY day except Friday last week, several hospitals across England didn’t have a single unoccupied bed,’ Donna Kinnair, Director of Nursing, Policy and Practice at the Royal College of Nursing said yesterday. She was responding to alarming new figures published by NHS England yesterday, which show that far from...
THE water crisis in Cape Town, South Africa’s second largest city, has become explosive as experts now estimate that ‘Day Zero’, the day when all water to the city dries up, will happen around April 12. This will make Cape Town the first major city in an advanced capitalist country...
WHEN CARILLION collapsed last month it left the future of the new Royal Liverpool Hospital in limbo. The half-built £335 million hospital which has already faced three delays, now faces an ‘extended delay’. The heads of the Hospital Trust faced angry questions from concerned residents, patients and hospital staff at...
HARINGEY workers and residents yesterday said they are glad to see the back of council leader Claire Kober and want her housing ‘regeneration’ scheme dropped. Kober resigned on Tuesday in the wake of mass opposition to the Haringey Development Vehicle, a £2bn deal with a private US developer that will...
CAPITA shares plunged over 40% yesterday, provoking speculation that the huge conglomerate privateer is going the way of Carillion and is set to crash. Over the eight years of Tory and Tory-LibDem governments, Capita has picked up many health service contracts and operates widely in the NHS. It also...
PRESIDENT Trump began his ‘State of the Union’ speech on Tuesday night by repeatedly congratulating himself, saying, ‘Less than one year has passed since I first stood at this podium … Each day since, we have gone forward with a clear vision and a righteous mission – to make...