Monthly Archives: September 2018

THE ENTIRE leadership of the nurses union RCN has been sacked by the membership! A vote of no confidence at an Extraordinary General Meeting (EGM) in Birmingham was passed yesterday. The RCN membership had forced the leadership to call the EGM, with more than 1,000 members signing a petition triggering...

IN AN historic moment for Mexico’s trade union movement, the Mexican Senate has unanimously ratified International Labour Organisation (ILO) Convention No. 98, which guarantees the right to organise and collective bargaining, says IndustriAll Global Union. ‘This country has a longstanding social debt towards the working class, but from now on...

TO THE ALARM and anger of all those Labour supporters who voted to break from the EU, Labour is swiftly and openly becoming the Party of ‘remain’. The Labour Party conference was a watershed moment for Labour. First of all, on the eve of the Labour Party conference,...

OVER one thousand head teachers across England and Wales yesterday held a mass protest over savage cuts to their schools’ budgets. Heads from Peterborough, Cumbria, Somerset, Suffolk, Hampshire and Brighton delivered a letter to Chancellor Hammond at 11, Downing Street calling for him to reverse the cuts. The protest was...

The US administration’s recent destructive and irresponsible moves threaten to plunge the entire region into chaos, violence and instability, Hanan Ashrawi, member of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) said on Wednesday. Ashrawi also lashed out at Israel saying it is incumbent upon the international community to...

THE INQUIRY into the Grenfell Tower inferno was told this week by senior London Fire Brigade officer Andrew O’Loughlin that ‘The building was so horrendous several hours later that I think no one should have lived in the building.’ O’Loughlin was the senior officer present at the blaze that killed...

‘THE MONEY’S there. We want our share!’ said striking lecturers at Lewisham Southwark College in southeast London yesterday morning. Members of the University and College Union (UCU) at the college began two days of action, yesterday and today, in a row over pay. This came after talks between the union...

THE BANKRUPTCY last January of Carillion, Britain’s largest construction company, is going to cost the working class more than £150 million on top of the thousands of jobs that were lost. Following a Freedom of Information request by the Unite union into the projected cost to the taxpayer for the...

Every single Greek state-owned building is being passed by the government over to the EU-IMF controlled EESYP (Greek Properties Company) to pay back creditors. Greek public debt is estimated at about 315bn euros! Hospitals, schools, universities, institutions, old people’s homes, orphanages, theatres, archaeological sites, museums, ministry and state buildings...

LABOUR leader Jeremy Corbyn, in his speech to the party conference yesterday, made Tory PM May an offer: he said that Labour would give the May government its full support if she delivers a satisfactory Brexit deal. He said, directing his comments to May: ‘If you deliver a deal which...

END the blockade of Gaza! Stop selling arms to Israel! Investigate Israel for war crimes! delegate to the Labour Party conference, Sarah Jane Potter from the TSSA union, demanded in moving a resolution on Palestine. She said to applause: ‘We all know that Trump’s decision to move the US embassy...

‘CONFERENCE, it is right that Parliament has the first say, but if we need to break the impasse our options must include campaigning for a public vote and nobody is ruling out remain as an option,’ Keir Starmer, shadow Brexit Secretary told the Labour Conference yesterday. Starmer said: ‘If the...

Public services support staff – including teaching assistants and hospital porters – are doing more than 40 million hours of unpaid overtime a year, says a report from Unison published yesterday. The figure is the equivalent of 25,000 extra public service staff working full time. It highlights how far workers...

ON MONDAY the Chinese government issued a document accusing US president Donald Trump’s administration of ‘trade bullyism practices’ that represent the ‘greatest source of uncertainty and risk for the global recovery.’ The document went on: ‘China does not want a trade war, but it is not afraid of one and...

A TOTAL of 21,800 workers have been killed in work-related accidents in the country since the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power 16 years ago, a report drafted by Turkey’s main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), drafted by CHP Ankara deputy Tekin Bingöl, shows. According to the...

Both Jeremy Corbyn and his deputy, shadow chancellor John McDonnell, unveiled their ‘radical’ new plans for saving British capitalism from the anger of the working class. On Sunday, Corbyn announced plans to force private businesses to reserve one-third of the seats on their board of directors for workers they...

‘WE WILL be bringing water, energy, Royal Mail, rail back into public ownership again,’ shadow chancellor John McDonnell said to cheers during his speech to the Labour Party conference yesterday. ‘Public ownership has proved its popularity in opinion poll after opinion poll, but it’s not surprising, is it? ‘Look at...

‘WE BELIEVE that the blame for the Russian Il-20 aircraft tragedy lies entirely with the Israeli Air Force,’ Russian Defence Ministry spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov, told journalists yesterday. The plane was shot down on September 17th by the Syrian air defence units as Israeli F-16s effectively used it as...

AS A FRESH year of students start at their new universities, it has come to light that fifty-four student halls of residence tower blocks are wrapped in the same flammable cladding as the Grenfell Tower. Cladding has now been shown in the case of Grenfell Tower to be responsible...

YESTERDAY morning, both in the capitalist press and on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said that if the Labour Party conference decided to call for a second referendum over leaving the EU, that would be OK with him. This was after deputy party leader Tom Watson,...

YESTERDAY Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn came out publicly to proclaim that he is prepared to go to any lengths to appease the right wing of the party, betray the working class and side with the bankers and bosses desperate to keep the country tied to the EU. On the eve...

A HUNDRED THOUSAND Swazi workers have begun a campaign of mass action, led by the Trade Union Congress of Swaziland (TUCOSWA), and its affiliates. On Tuesday 18 September, protesters flooded the streets of four towns, and in the march in Manzini alone at least ten were confirmed as...

WHEN TORY PM May went to the European Union to try and sell her Chequers plan she was met with a unanimous ‘NO’ from the EU leaders. She left with her tail between her legs to face the music back in the UK. The EU is opposed...

LARGE cuts are looming at the TBAP multi-academy trust, which runs schools in London, Essex, Cambridgeshire and the North West, following accusations of financial mismanagement, said education unions yesterday. The TBAP trust, which teaches children excluded from mainstream education, plans to cut over £2.5m (14.4%) from its budget, say the...

AFTER PM May’s Chequers deal was blown out of the water by the EU on Thursday evening, yesterday May ‘addressed the nation’ and said she was prepared to walk away from negotiations and break with the EU without a deal. ‘Despite the progress that we have made, there are...

THE WEST has plotted against Syria with the aim of changing the country’s stances, policies and national identity to serve a ‘New Middle East’ project that imitates the Judaism project of ‘Israel’ and cancels the Palestinian people’s right to establish their own independent state. Syria’s Permanent Representative to the United...

‘A SIGNIFICANT victory’ for health workers is how Unite described the decision by NHS Improvement to ‘pause’ the setting up of wholly owned subsidiary companies. The plan was that NHS Trusts strip low-paid cleaners, security guards, catering staff, porters of their NHS contracts and dump them into these companies...

THE LEADERS of England’s councils have predicted the inevitability of ‘unpalatable cutbacks’ in vital council services next year as a result of the Tories making further reductions in local authority spending. The County Council Network yesterday announced that councils had already identified at least £1 billion of ‘savings’ made by...

Garment workers’ unions in Bangladesh have rejected an increase in the minimum wage, describing it as a ‘cruel joke’ and a ‘slap on the face,’ with hundreds of workers protesting in the streets in Dhaka last Friday. Turning down the minimum wage of Tk 8,000 as fixed by the...

THE RESPONSE of Russia’s political leadership, led by Vladimir Putin, to the Israeli raid on Syria that led to the death of 15 Russian aviators has been the opposite to the country’s military leadership. The Russian leader has not condemned Israel. He described the loss of the Ilyushin-20 over the...

‘THE GOVERNMENT should immediately suspend charging for NHS maternity care,’ for non-UK residents, concludes a new report released yesterday from Maternity Action. The report, called ‘What Price Safe Motherhood? Charging for NHS Maternity Care in England and its Impact on Migrant Women,’ states that ‘charging has a deterrent effect on...

Israeli forces fired on Palestinian farmers as they were working on their lands east of Khan Younis on Monday morning. Khan Younis is a city in the southern Gaza Strip with a population of over 300,000. The farmers were fired on from military observation towers and forced to evacuate...

THE ISRAELI regime has repaid Russia and President Putin for their attempts to reach some agreement over a withdrawal of Iranian forces from Syria, to make Israel feel more secure, by using a Russian Ilyushin Il-20 reconnaissance aircraft as a shield to draw Syrian missile fire, so that four...

RUSSIA ‘reserves the right to respond’ after Israel’s actions led to the downing of a military plane in Latakia in Syria, resulting in the deaths of 15 crew. Russian Defence Ministry Spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov warned yesterday: ‘We consider these provocative actions by Israel as hostile. Fifteen...

‘WE HAVE no ability to turn the economy around. When the next recession comes it is going to be deeper and last longer than in the past. We don’t have any strategy to deal with it,’ Professor Martin Feldstein, former chair of the White House Council of economic advisors,...

THOUSANDS of members of the United Steelworkers (USW) union from across the United States voted overwhelmingly last week to authorise their bargaining committee to initiate a strike at US Steel facilities. The committee could now call a strike if the company continues to demand deep concessions from its hourly...

JAGUAR workers have been put on a three-day week until Christmas! This affects as many as half of the two thousand workers at its Castle Bromwich plant in Birmingham who have been moved from a five to a three-day week. JLR (Jaguar Land Rover) claimed in a statement it was...

THE NATIONAL Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) says last Thursday’s Constitutional Court ruling reinstating nine employees who were dismissed for singing struggle songs is a victory for all workers in the country. The nine were fired by manufacturing firm Duncanmec in 2013 for singing a song which loosely...

YEMENI families are starving with nothing to eat but leaves as Saudi Arabia steps up its deadly bombing campaign using British bombs and missiles to slaughter Yemeni men, women and children. Mothers are picking leaves from the local Halas vine, and boiling them into a sour, acidic green paste as...

THE LABOUR Party Conference in Liverpool next week is set to battle over the mandatory reselection of MPs. If it is agreed it will be easier for Labour members to deselect and replace sitting right wing MPs, according to Corbyn-backing Labour MP for Derby North, Chris Williamson. At present, Labour...

DOCTORS and nurses slammed government cuts and warned of a new winter crisis in response to the latest NHS Digital performance figures released on Thursday. The August performance figures show the NHS entering autumn in a fragile state, said the President of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, Dr...

US MILITARY forces have just held eight days of exercises with Syrian terrorists in the south of the country around the US military base of Tanf, near to the Syrian-Iraq border. This is while the Syrian government forces are preparing to launch the battle for Idlib, the last major...

ROYAL Bank of Scotland (RBS) chief executive Ross McEwan has been accused by MPs on the Treasury Select Committee of withholding information about an investigation into criminal activity within the bank. He had been giving evidence about the way the bank’s Global Restructuring Group (GRG) had treated small business...

Also celebrating 48 Years of The News Line Sunday, 12th November 2018, 2pm - 8pm at The Camden Centre, Bidborough Street, WC1H 9AU. Rally Films Theatre Art exhibition Purchase your tickets now! This event is in the past; tickets cannot be purchased. <!-- Rally Only - £5.00 Films and Theatre - £10.00 Purchase with...

NO ACTION is to be taken against the police after the death of Leon Briggs, who died after being restrained by police in 2013, the Crown Prosecution Service announced yesterday, to the furious anger of his family. His family vow to continue to fight until they get justice. Leon...