Monthly Archives: November 2018
‘THE GOVERNMENT is in chaos,’ Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn told Parliament yesterday, responding to Tory PM May’s speech attempting to defend her Brexit capitulation to the EU. Corbyn said: ‘After two years of bungled negotiations the government has produced a botched deal, which breaches the Prime Minister’s own red lines...
The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) condemns in the strongest terms the management of United Pharmaceutical Distribution (UPD) for shooting at unarmed defenceless workers during a picket! Workers at UPD in Gauteng have been on strike since Monday to demand higher wages and improved benefits. On Tuesday,...
THE BMA has criticised the ‘appalling’ failure by health privateer Capita to send cervical screening letters to up to 48,000 women. It has written to the chief executive of NHS England expressing its extreme concern after being made aware that up to 48,500 women have not received information regarding...
THE United Nations Security Council (UNSC) met behind closed doors over the situation in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, but failed to reach an agreement on how to deal with the deadly Israeli air attacks. Requested by Kuwait and Bolivia, the 50-minute emergency session was held after Gaza was hit...
LIBERTY has welcomed Monday’s (12th November), ‘huge legal victory’ which protects NHS patients by pulling doctors out of the Tory government’s hostile environment policy. A backroom deal allowing the Home Office to request patient data from the NHS to target people for deportation has been scrapped following a legal challenge. The...
NEGOTIATIONS over the UK’s departure from the EU are ‘now in the endgame’, according to PM May, with both sides ‘working through the night to make progress’ she told the Lord Mayor’s Banquet in the City of London on Monday night. May has already been warned by Tory MPs and...
UNDER-FIRE City College Plymouth (CCP) principal Garry Phillips resigned yesterday after a damning report earlier this month exposed serious leadership failings at his previous college, Ealing, Hammersmith and West London College, which is now in administered status. Under his leadership it went from a £5.7m surplus in 2015/16 to an...
LACK of midwives and the closure of maternity units have resulted in more babies suffering from brain damage, dying during childbirth, or dying soon after, a new study concludes, adding that 70% of such deaths could have been prevented if there were more staff, training and maternity departments. The study,...
WITH THE Tory government of Theresa May staggering from one crisis to another this week over the issue of Brexit, the desperation of the ruling class to overturn the referendum result was on public display yesterday when they were forced to wheel out ex-Labour chancellor and prime minister Gordon...
A PLAN to move out-of-hours surgery from Cheltenham General Hospital seven miles away to Gloucester has been slammed by almost 60 consultants and senior doctors as ‘not safe’ and the ‘catastrophic’ move has been described by one doctor as a ‘plane crash about to happen’. The 60 consultants and senior...
A COURT in Turkey has sentenced a journalist working for Syria’s official news agency, SANA, to more than four years in prison for allegedly insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan but indeed exposing the Ankara government’s support for foreign-sponsored Takfiri terrorists operating inside Syria. The Istanbul Criminal Court passed the ruling...
THAT BANKRUPT British capitalism and imperialism is unable to stand on its own two feet anymore is obvious. It faces the prospect of the ruling Tory party splitting apart, as well as the Ulster Unionists refusing to support May’s plans for the UK to become a vassal state of...
LABOUR’S SHADOW foreign secretary Emily Thornberry joined hands yesterday with resigned Tory Transport Minister Jo Johnson in declaring for a second referendum to reverse the decision of the first, that the UK must leave the EU. Trying to cover her tracks Thornberry declared: ‘Well, let’s start with the fact that...
TEACHERS in the UK work ‘some of the longest hours in the world’ a study of 35 countries in the world has found, with British teachers working a 51-hour a week, the fourth longest. This is according to a major new global survey called the Global Teacher Status Index. Teachers in...
AT LEAST one in 10 landlords are ‘unlawfully’ advertising their flat for rent by saying that they do not accept tenants on housing benefit, homeless charity Shelter revealed yesterday. The Irish Studies Centre at London Metropolitan University documents that in the post-World War II years home hunters were confronted with...
RMT is calling for an immediate halt and reversal of plans to axe guards from trains after a government minister admitted that they are in the front line in the fight against crime. In a letter from Organised Crime Minister Ben Wallace to MP John Woodcock, the minister openly admits...
HANAN Ashrawi, member of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), warned on Wednesday against attempts to impose an economic or humanitarian solution on Gaza and to separate it from the rest of the occupied West Bank (including East Jerusalem). ‘A political solution based on legality, morality and...
‘JOHN Roan Resists!’ is the battle cry of 1,200 pupils, their parents and 60 teachers who are in an escalating struggle to stop their council-run school, one of the oldest in the country being forced to become a privately-run academy. Teachers at the school in Greenwich, south-east London, who belong...
IT EMERGED this week that the company hired by the Tories to test for flammable cladding on government and other public buildings in the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire atrocity has been ‘gagged’ from criticising prime minister Theresa May. The company, WSP, was required to sign a UK government...
‘OVER half of all major Emergency Departments are currently operating in the Red Zone,’ Dr Adrian Boyle of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine warned yesterday. The Red Zone is when 85 per cent of patients waiting in A&E are not seen within a four-hour period. Dr Adrian Boyle continued:...
STOP British bombs from fuelling the crisis in Yemen, demands Oxfam. The charity warns in a statement: ‘The war in Yemen has been brutal. Since 2015, deadly clashes and airstrikes have killed 3,980, injured over 33,000, and forced 3.1 million to flee their homes. ‘At the same time, food shortages...
THE DEMOCRATS have taken control of the US House of Representatives in the mid-term elections, dealing a blow to President Donald Trump. However, the Republicans won the elections to the Senate, increasing their representation from 51 to 54. This ensures Trump will still have a majority to confirm his executive...
THE PRISON Officers Association (POA) has condemned as ‘repugnant’ the Tory plan to hand over the running of two new prisons to privateers and has demanded a public inquiry into the matter. HMP Glen Parva in Leicestershire and HMP Wellingborough are being built from the public purse, but handed over...
WITH the crisis of capitalism deepening, the UK bosses and bankers are using the US trade war, the developing banking collapse and slump (on a greater scale than the 2008 crash) to bring in a series of industrial closures and a mass privatisation of services. Michelin workers in Dundee have...
IN THE last year 29,000 people waited over six weeks for results from their scans and biopsies, due to a massive shortage of NHS staff. This risks cancers spreading while patients wait for their results to come back, the Royal Society of Radiographers (RSR) warned yesterday. One-in-seven has waited...
OVER 100 workers, trade unionists and youth attended the rally at the Indian YMCA in Fitzroy Square, central London on Sunday to mark the 49th anniversary of the daily News Line and the 78th anniversary of the assassination of Leon Trotsky. Delivering the opening address, All Trades Unions Alliance...
THE TRUMP administration imposed its long threatened sanctions against Iran yesterday – a move that was greeted with dire warnings from market analysts that it would drive the price of oil up to $80 dollars a barrel by the end of the year with $100 a barrel being reached...
‘WE WILL proudly break the sanctions,’ Iranian leader President Hassan Rouhani said defiantly at a meeting of economic officials yesterday, describing the new wave of sanctions imposed by the US as ‘a declaration of economic war’. Rouhani insisted that Iran will ‘continue selling oil’ and vowed to break the sanctions...
JOSHUA Ogunleye, the WRP General Secretary, told the over 100-strong News Line 49th Anniversary rally yesterday: ‘Workers and young people hate capitalism! ‘This is why Deliveroo workers are taking to the streets of London. ‘This is why McDonald’s workers went on strike. This is why capitalism has to be...
PALESTINIAN Arabic dailies on Friday highlighted the Israeli government’s approval of the construction of new settlement units in the heart of Hebron’s old city. Al-Quds reported that the Israeli government has advanced a plan to construct new settler units in the vegetable market, known as al-Hisbeh, in Hebron’s old...
THE CEDAR CENTRE, the chemotherapy unit at the King George Hospital in Ilford is to shut down on November 12th, because it cannot find the four nurses that are required to keep it going! Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals Trust has also said it is not opening an ambulatory...
TRAIN drivers’ union ASLEF’s general secretary, Mick Whelan, has written an article reasserting the union’s commitment to withdrawing from the European Union. It was written for the Scottish Left Review and reprinted in The Scotsman on Wednesday. ASLEF, along with the RMT union and the Bakers’ Union stood together during the...
US PRESIDENT Donald Trump spat on the Statue of Liberty this week and the revolutionary history of the United States, especially its call from the Statue of Liberty to the world: ‘Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your...
MET Police chief Cressida Dick said yesterday that her officers were assessing online material and allegations of anti-Semitic hate crimes within the Labour Party. Dick who gave the order to shoot to kill the entirely innocent Jean Charles de Menezes, on the grounds that he was a terrorist,...
THE UK’s largest car maker, Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), yesterday announced a massive pre-tax loss of £354 million for the six months to September this year. The response of JLR to this catastrophic loss was to announce that it was embarking on a turnaround plan to cut 2.5 billion pounds...
SURVIVORS of the horrific Grenfell fire are to be forced onto Universal Credit just days before Christmas. Documents released ‘quietly on Budget Day’ show that North Kensington Jobcentre Plus will start introducing the hated benefit system from 12 December. All of those who use the Jobcentre, who have a change...
PRESIDENT Hassan Rouhani has assured the Iranian nation of the government’s resolve to stand up to US threats, emphasising that his team will do all in its power to resolve the economic problems caused by American pressure. ‘November 4 this year translates into a new instance of oppression by America,’...
GPs FACE takeover by commercial providers warns the BMA. Plans to introduce ICPs (Integrated Care Providers) in England must not allow private firms to take over the provision of care for entire health economies and should protect contractual arrangements for GPs. Those warnings are among the BMA’s responses to an...
THE MURDER of teacher José Domingo Ulcué Collazos in the Colombian department of Cauca on 22nd October has been condemned by teachers’ union FECODE, which has demanded the government investigates the case and prosecutes those responsible. Cauca Department is a Department of Colombia located in the southwestern part of the...
IT HAS got very hot in the warmongers’ kitchen when reputedly fire-proof US militarists like US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have both intervened to call for a swift cessation of hostilities in the Yemen. Mattis said yesterday that the US wanted to see all...