Monthly Archives: September 2018

DEPRIVING Palestinian refugees of their basic rights is a recipe for trouble, says PLO official Hanan Ashrawi. Depriving 5.3 million Palestinian refugees of their right to education, health and work by dismantling the international agency that has been taking care of them since their forced dispersion in 1948...

ON THE eve of the tenth anniversary of collapse into bankruptcy of the US investment bank Lehman Brothers, which brought the world’s capitalist banking and financial system to the very brink of complete collapse, Gordon Brown has warned that ‘a leaderless world is sleepwalking into a future crisis.’ In an...

THE SOUTH African City of Ekurhuleni on Monday suspended 48 female firefighters after they protested about their working conditions and the non-payment of shift allowances. The female firefighters demonstrated in Pretoria two weeks ago complaining about conditions of service in the city, including having to work more than eight hours...

THE shortage of NHS staff in England is worsening official figures show. One in 11 posts is vacant, with the situation particularly bad among the nursing workforce. Experts rightly describe this situation as a ‘national emergency’ given the continuing rising demands for NHS treatment. The latest figures have been...

TUC DELEGATES in Manchester yesterday waved Palestinian flags as they voted unanimously for Emergency Motion 4, ‘Cuts to UNWRA and the Nation-State Law.’ This condemns the Knesset vote on 19th July and also the decision by US President Trump to cut the UN Works and Relief Agency aid budget...

On the occasion of International Literacy Day, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) published a report last week on the illiteracy rate in Palestine and confirmed that it is one of the lowest in the world. The report said that the illiteracy rate in 2017 was 3.3% (7,898 illiterate)...

RUSSIA has begun its largest military manoeuvres in four decades in eastern Siberia, with thousands of troops from China and Mongolia also taking part. The five-day military drill, ‘Vostok-2018’, involves almost 300,000 Russian troops, more than 1,000 planes, drones and helicopters, and up to 36,000 military land vehicles, including tanks,...

‘ZERO hours contracts will be banned’ under a Labour government Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell said yesterday in a keynote address to the TUC Congress in Manchester. McDonnell said: ‘We will repeal the act which I fought so hard against. We will repeal the Trade Union Act in our first...

THE TRUMP administration announced yesterday that it will shut the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) diplomatic office in Washington with US national security advisor John Bolton stating ‘The United States will always stand with our friend and ally, Israel.’ Bolton continued: ‘The Trump administration will not keep the office open when...

LARGE numbers of delegates stopped at the WRP and Young Socialists lobby of the opening day of the TUC Congress in Manchester on Sunday. Many supported its demands that included that the TUC call a general strike to bring down the Tories, and that a...

DELEGATES at the Trade Union Congress in Manchester yesterday voted unanimously for Composite Motion 3: Grenfell Tower. The motion condemns the tragedy where 72 men, women and children died while also condemning the use of flammable cladding and the lack of safety regulation. It states: ‘Congress demands that the...

RMT leader Mick Cash hit out to oppose the TUC General Council statement on Brexit saying that it was a staging post to try to lever the trade union movement in behind the campaign for what is a de facto second referendum. Cash said that the campaign for a people’s...

IRANIAN President Hassan Rouhani says the United States must swiftly end its ‘illegal presence and interference’ in Syria, which, he added, has led to the continuation of insecurity in the war-ravaged country. The Iranian president made the remarks while addressing a key trilateral summit in Tehran on Friday focusing on...

THE ‘leader’ of the Trade Union Congress, Frances O’Grady yesterday stabbed millions of workers in the back when she declared on The Andrew Marr Show that she was in favour of a second referendum, to achieve an ‘acceptable deal’ that would mean the UK remaining in the single market...

TUC DELEGATES on the opening day of their Congress in Manchester yesterday, were lobbied by a large delegation of WRP and YS members and also a Chagos Islands delegation. The Chagossians called for support for their struggle to return to their island homeland in the Pacific. Delegates told News...

THE SOUTH African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU) demands that Markus Jooste, the former Chief Executive Officer of Steinhoff, be arrested and charged with negligent and reckless financial management, fraud and corruption, in connection with the scandal in December 2017 when the company’s share price collapsed in just two...

THE DEPTH of the crisis of the UK ruling class can be gauged by the fact that they have been forced to bring the completely discredited Tony Blair into the fight to try to prevent a Corbyn-led Labour government in the UK. Blair should be in The Hague in prison...

TWO Labour MPs who lost no-confidence votes among local party members have told constituents they will not quit. Former minister, and chair of Labour Friends of Israel Joan Ryan, the MP for Enfield North, blamed the 95-92 vote defeat on ‘Trots, Stalinists, Communists and assorted hard-left’. Gavin Shuker, Luton South...

RUSSIAN fighter jets have bombed terrorist positions in Syria’s Idlib, as the Syrian government troops are preparing for a ground operation to liberate the territory, the Russian army said. The ministry, in a statement released on Wednesday, announced that the aerial attack had only pounded members of the Jabhat Fateh al-Sham Takfiri...

ITALY’S economic crisis is reaching the point of explosion, an explosion that even bourgeois economists fear will bring down the eurozone and the entire European Union with it. Figures this week show that the output of manufacturing industry in the country, crucial to the Italian economy, has at the very...

DOCTORS’ leaders yesterday spoke out against appointing former Tory health minister Lord Prior as Chair of NHS England. Prior, who served in the Tory government between 2015 and 2017, has been named preferred candidate to succeed Sir Malcolm Grant in the role. Prior’s emergence as the May government’s chosen candidate...

THE Labour Party’s NEC on Tuesday gave way to the Tory-Zionist witch-hunt and agreed to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism which equates anti-Zionism with racism, and glorifies the Israeli terrorist state. An attempt by Labour leader Corbyn to add to the IHRA definition a clause...

DRASTIC cuts, staff restructuring and rocketing stress levels are becoming the norm in UK schools, according to a survey of school support staff published on Tuesday by Unison. The findings – summarised in the report Lessons in Austerity – highlight the funding crisis that is having such a devastating effect...

REFUGEES, asylum seekers and those that the Home Office are seeking to deport are being set to work in the detention centres, and paid just £1 an hour! The detainees have got together to take a legal challenge out against the Home Office against what they rightly say is...

THE LABOUR Party’s governing body, the National Executive Committee (NEC), yesterday adopted all of the examples of ‘anti-Semitism’ in the international definition, in addition to the definition itself. The meeting, scheduled to last for half an hour, actually went on for four and a half hours as the NEC thrashed...

BRITAIN has apologised to the Chagos Islanders for the ‘shameful’ way it evicted them from the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean. The apology came on the first day of a hearing on the future of the islands at the International Court of Justice at the Hague. The US and...

IRANIAN Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has insisted that the Islamic Republic will continue to support Syria in its fight against terrorist groups. Zarif made the comments in a meeting with Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Muallem in Damascus on Monday ahead of a planned summit of Iranian, Russian and Turkish...

FORMER secretary of state John Kerry has revealed the Obama administration’s frustrations with Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu in a new book slated for release this month. According to excerpts released by a Washington newsletter, Kerry began losing trust in Netanyahu in 2014 during Israel’s last war on Gaza, when...

School children in England are being put in ‘physically and mentally cruel’ isolation units for up to 7 hours a day at academy trust schools. This was the conclusion of Labour MP Paul Williams in July when he demanded in Parliament a meeting with the Tory schools minister over the...

CHAGOS Islanders travelled from the UK to Holland yesterday to protest outside the International Court of Justice in The Hague to demand the right for them to return to their island, from which they were brutally evicted by the British rulers in the 1960s. Britain claims the Chagos Islands...

ONE hundred and eighteen council housing sites in London are facing privatisation, demolition or ‘regeneration,’ which will mean, according to council responses to a freedom of information request, that more than 31,000 residents will be evicted. Campaigners say that as a result as many as 8,000 homes in London will...

IN an Open Letter published on Friday in the Guardian newspaper, 15 academics and scientists from around the world expressed opposition to holding a conference on cosmology and particle physics in the Israeli Ariel University because it is located in an illegal settlement in the occupied Palestinian territory. ‘We are...

SHADOW chancellor John McDonnell is ‘worried and saddened’ by the prospect of a Labour Party split and has appealed to MPs considering leaving the party to engage in dialogue with the leadership. n an exclusive interview with Jason Cowley in this week’s New Statesman, he admitted that he wanted to...

SHADOW chancellor John McDonnell has revealed he is ‘worried and saddened’ about the prospect of the Labour Party being split by the fake ‘Labour is anti-Semitic’ campaign, being driven forward by the Tories and their allies. McDonnell told the New Statesman he wanted to avoid a split ‘at all costs’....

ONE-IN-FOUR student nurses are dropping out of their degrees before graduation, according to a new investigation, adding to the ongoing NHS staffing crisis, warns the Royal College of Nursing. With the health service struggling to cope with a massive shortage of nurses – estimated at 40,000 vacant posts in England...

INDUSTRIALL global union marked a historic moment as Mexican union leader, Napoleón Gómez Urrutia, returned to his country after 12 years in exile to be sworn in as senator, in a ceremony in Mexico City on 29 August. Napoleón Gómez Urrutia, president and general secretary of the Mexican Union of...

THE Police and Crime Commissioner’s (PCC) proposal to take control of Norfolk fire service will put ‘public safety at risk’, a councillor has said. Norfolk county councillors have voted for the fire service to remain in local authority hands. PCC Lorne Green said one commissioner could mean more joint working and...

BOTH the UK and the EU claimed yesterday that ‘progress’ is being made in the Brexit talks. Unresolved issues include intellectual property, data protection, the Irish border and the rule of the European Court of Justice. EU negotiator Michel Barnier said he needed detail from the UK on its...

COME over as a child from the Caribbean to the UK in the 1960s, go to school in the UK, work an entire life time in the UK, raise children in the UK, only then to be told you are not welcome in the UK, and be kicked out...