Monthly Archives: January 2019
THE ANNOUNCEMENT yesterday that the Japanese company Hitachi is pulling the plug on plans to build a nuclear power station in Wales has blown a massive hole in the Tories energy strategy. The giant Japanese conglomerate took over the contract to build up to six UK nuclear plants six years...
IT NOW takes so long for claims to be processed that 17,070 disabled people have died before receiving a penny because they were still waiting to hear whether their claim for disability benefit had been successful. And one-in-four (4,330) of those 17,070 were suffering from some form of cancer, while...
ON TUESDAY night prime minister Theresa May suffered the biggest political defeat in British parliamentary history when her Brexit deal, signed and sealed with the EU, was defeated by 432 to 202 votes, a massive majority of 230. In ordinary times, this would have led to an immediate resignation...
PRIME Minister May survived a no confidence vote by 325 to 306 votes after a vitriolic attack on the opposition parties especially the Labour Party by Environment Secretary Gove. After the vote May said that she would be discussing with other party leaders the way forward over Brexit, while Labour...
ZIMBABWE’S largest labour union confederation called a national strike starting midnight on Sunday/Monday after the government more than doubled fuel prices to among the highest in the world. The Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), which represents most labour unions in the country, issued the call on Sunday, just a...
ISRAEL, through its outgoing chief of staff Lieutenant General Gadi Eizenkot, has admitted that the many reports of the Israeli terrorist state’s collaboration with jihadist fanatics operating against the Syrian government are correct, and that it has provided them with weapons. Eizenkot told the Sunday Times that Israel supplied...
OVER 4,000 striking teachers and students marched through Athens city centre last Monday afternoon in a joyful mood sensing that they were winning the fight against the government’s Education Bill. Throughout the march teachers sang songs, chanted slogans and clapped their hands to the beat of drums. They shouted ‘indefinite...
SOUTH Africa’s Minister of Labour, Mildred Oliphant, says 2019 is the ‘earliest opportunity’ for government to implement the R20 per hour National Minimum Wage, which became effective on January 1st. ‘Previously, (during apartheid) workers didn’t have any rights,’ she commented, adding that the Freedom Charter envisioned a minimum wage ‘but...
THE FRENCH Revolution of millions of workers and youth is hotting up with the news that the hated French riot police are now deploying with semi-automatic weapons and live ammunition against the Yellow Vest protestors. CRS riot police were filmed brandishing Heckler & Koch G36 weapons near the Arc de...
TENS of thousands of junior doctors are working beyond contracted hours without a break, making them extremely tired which, in turn, puts patients’ lives at risk, a new analysis by the Health Service Journal revealed yesterday. It shows 60,000 contract breaches reported by junior doctors, with NHS trusts forced...
EGYPT’S President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has just acknowledged, in an interview broadcast just eight days ago on US television, that his administration maintains deep relations with the regime in Tel Aviv, and is engaged in military cooperation with Israel in the Sinai Peninsula. Sisi made the acknowledgment during an...
TOMORROW will see the moment of truth for both the Tory and Labour Parties when May’s programme for a Brexit that will leave the UK as a ‘vassal state prisoner’ of the EU goes to the vote. It is almost certain to be defeated by a mass of Tory, Labour,...
OVER 5,000 striking state schools teachers marched through the Athens city centre last Friday and attempted to storm into the Vouli building (Greek parliament) and then into the Prime Minister’s Office. They were demanding the government withdraw an Education Bill that condemns short-contract teachers with years of service to sackings...
‘EVIDENCE shows’, says a just-released statement by the Hazards Campaign, ‘that the three factors that make work “safer and healthier” are – strong laws, their strict enforcement, and strong, active trade unions.’ It particularly insists: ‘Unionised workplaces with elected safety reps using full Safety Reps and Safety Committee Regulation rights...
TORY PM May spoke to Unite’s Len McCluskey and the GMB’s Tim Roache by phone on Thursday for the first time since taking office, in a desperate attempt to convince them of her Brexit deal, and to persuade Labour MPs to back it. Roache said he was glad the PM...
AROUND 70,000 members of the University and College Union (UCU) in 143 UK universities are being balloted for strike action in a row over pay and conditions. The ballot opens on Tuesday (15 January) and closes on Friday 22 February. The dispute rests on universities’ failure to improve on the...
AS the RMT protested at the Department for Transport yesterday, the Shipping Minister Nusrat Ghani has refused to agree that UK employment legislation such as the national minimum wage or Equality Act which prevents pay discrimination, will apply in relation to the UK government’s Brexit ferry contracts, in an...
HUNDREDS of pregnant women, unaccompanied children and survivors of torture are being abandoned in refugee camps on the Greek islands, an Oxfam report revealed on Wednesday. At the end of December, the Moria camp in Lesvos was at around double its official capacity of 3,100 places, with just...
LABOUR leader Jeremy Corbyn yesterday stated that if Theresa May’s ‘Brexit Deal’ with the EU is defeated in parliament next week, then Labour will move a motion of no confidence in the government ‘at a time of our choosing,’ going on to say that the chaos in parliament cannot...
‘WE HAVE called for a new customs union, with a say in future trade deals, a strong single market relationship and a guarantee to keep pace with EU rights and standards,’ Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said when outlining his parties Brexit strategy while speaking in Wakefield, in the north...
GARMENT workers have flooded the streets of the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, this week, clashing with police and denouncing the new wages structure introduced on 1st December last year. Bangladesh police on Tuesday 8th January fired rubber bullets and tear gas as thousands of striking workers in the South Asian country’s...
ON TUESDAY night prime minister Theresa May suffered a humiliating defeat on a vote on the Tory finance bill - when an amendment which gives the majority of MPs opposed to Britain leaving the EU the power to effectively shut parliament down by stopping the government from spending money...
ISRAELI forces transferred a Palestinian man to a hospital after severely beating him in his house in Abu Shkheidim village, northwest of Ramallah, said an attorney on Wednesday. Mamon al-Hashem, an attorney representing the Palestine Prisoner’s Society, said that Ziyad Mohammad Shalalda, a 45-year-old resident of Abu Shkheidim village,...
THE LABOUR, Tory, LibDem, SNP alliance of pro-EU MPs yesterday afternoon delivered another blow on behalf of the European Union against the 2016 referendum result. They voted by 308 to 297 votes for a Dominic Grieve amendment that will require the PM to report back to parliament within...
A LANDMARK report by Shelter’s social housing commission published today calls for an ambitious 3.1 million new homes, extending the offer of social housing to many more people. After the Grenfell Tower fire, the charity brought together 16 independent commissioners with diverse backgrounds from across the political spectrum to examine...
THE CRISIS-RIDDEN EU is exploding as workers from the UK, France, Germany, Hungary, Greece, Italy and Catalonia rise up against the open dictatorship of the bosses and bankers of Europe and demand their rights and socialism. The French ‘Yellow Vests’ movement has grown stronger through its resistance to the hammer...
UNDER PM May’s long-term NHS plan, a new scheme is set out in which GPs are offered ‘shared savings’ for the amount of patients they divert from attending A&Es. The new scheme, offering GPs financial incentives not to refer their patients to hospitals, has been rightly slammed by GPs...
LABOUR Party MPs, supported by other opposition parties and some Tory MPs, pushed through an amendment to the Finance Bill last night which gives those opposed to a No Deal Brexit the power to shut Parliament down, therefore stopping Brexit in its tracks. The Amendment 7 passed with 303...
IT EMERGED at the weekend that the latest stage in a coup to overturn the Brexit referendum result by an alliance of right-wing Labour MPs, Tory Remainers, LibDems and the Green Party will take the form of an attempt to copy a Donald Trump style shutdown of parliament. This reactionary...
‘How does the government expect to deliver everything promised in the plan without the staff to deliver the services,’ asked GMB union yesterday in a stinging rebuttal of Tory PM May’s NHS Plan which she unveiled yesterday. Under the plan hospital patients will be questioned on their drinking habits and...
OFFICIALS in the House of Commons have installed a tamper alarm to stop Labour MP, Stephen Pound, turning a bust of Oliver Cromwell to face the wall in the House of Commons in protest against the Lord Protector’s revolutionary role. Pound told the Mail Online: ‘The butcher turned up on...
AROUND 250 members of Turkey’s IndustriALL trade union affiliate Selüloz-Is have won an outstanding victory after being out on strike for six months. Selüloz-Is members had been on strike since 20th June – after negotiations on a new collective agreement failed as management proposed a zero per cent wage increase!...
AS TEMPERATURES plummet the Society for Acute Medicine (SAM) anticipates ‘mayhem this weekend’ with the winter flu epidemic kicking in, affecting hundreds of hospitals across the UK, already stretched to breaking point because of a severe lack of staff. Dr Nick Scriven, president of the Society said: ‘Influenza is here...
TORY Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt has admitted for the first time that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad will remain in office. Hunt made the remark on Thursday, as Syrian government troops, with the help of Russia’s air cover, have managed to restore full control over vast regions of the country...
YEMEN is facing ‘the worst epidemic of cholera since records began’, a report from inside Yemen has warned. The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), a non-profit conflict-research is warning too that the Saudi-led war on Yemen has so far claimed the lives of around 56,000 Yemenis. It...
YESTERDAY, a Chinese spacecraft made a giant leap forward in human exploration of space when it became the first ever to land on the far side of the moon. The robotic probe, the Chang’e-4, landed in the South Pole-Aitken basin, the largest crater on the moon surface where for...
THE PRIVATISATION of the NHS blood samples service in Kent will put patients’ lives at risk, Unite warned yesterday, adding: ‘It must be stopped!’ A New Year campaign has been launched by Unite to stop the pathology services in Kent being outsourced to a ‘profit hungry’ private company. Unite is...