Monthly Archives: March 2019
PM MAY lost her latest high-stakes gamble in the House of Commons when her EU Withdrawal Bill was defeated by 344-286 MPs despite a number of leading Tory Brexiteers deciding to vote for her, along with a number of Labour MPs. After the announcement of the result, Labour leader Corbyn...
‘THIS CAMPAIGN is a life saver!’ Devinder Bhambra told News Line on the mass picket of Ealing Hospital yesterday morning to celebrate the news that the A&E has now been saved and to demand the maternity services and children’s ward be re-opened. Devinder, who has been campaigning for years with...
EXTENSIVE research by the University of Central Lancashire into toxic contamination surrounding the Grenfell Tower after the tragic fire there has now been published following the preliminary report from last year. The paper is published by the Chemosphere journal, and its lead author is Professor Anna Stec, who has acted...
THE PLANS to close Ealing and Charing Cross A&Es have been scrapped after a mass campaign by the West London Council of Action secured a hard-fought victory. For the last seven years, ever since the Tories announced they were planning to close the A&Es at Ealing and Charing Cross, the...
A TOXIC cocktail of benzene, hydrogen cyanide (HCN), as well as many known cancer-causing chemicals and fibres have been found in soil taken from the west London area around where the Grenfell Tower fire took place, research by the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) revealed yesterday. This puts residents in...
AMIDST all the chaos and downright farce in Parliament on Wednesday only one indisputable fact remains – on the 23rd June 2016 in a nationwide referendum 17.4 million people voted to leave the EU! This vote was a crushing blow to the British ruling class and its servants in Parliament...
THE JOBS of 90,000 gold and platinum mineworkers’ are at risk as Eskom (the state-owned South African electricity public utility, established in 1923 as the Electricity Supply Commission) price increases threaten. The Minerals Council South Africa is ringing alarm bells over the threat posed to employment and production in the...
The TORY government has been forced to back down over its hated ‘Shaping a Healthier Future’ (SaHF) NHS cuts and closure programme in north west London. Central to it were the planned closures of the A&E departments at Ealing and Charing Cross Hospitals, which have now been ditched. Tory Health Secretary...
THE President of the European Council warned yesterday that anti-Brexit British voters who want to remain in the EU must not be ‘betrayed’. Treating Britain as an unruly province of a new Roman empire, Tusk said many of the millions of people who had signed a petition to revoke Article...
YOUNG teachers in Morocco who have been striking and protesting outside the parliament in Rabat for three weeks against being employed on inferior conditions compared to their more long-standing colleagues, have refused to disperse, despite being fired on with water cannon. At the same time as the Moroccan state is...
Nine out of ten nurses say understaffing is affecting quality of care for patients, a Nursing Standard poll reveals. The RCN (Royal College of Nursing) has carried out an exclusive poll of 2,000 nurses showing the impact understaffing is having on nurses and patient care. Nurses responded with one message –...
ON MONDAY, US President Donald Trump signed a declaration that recognised Israeli ‘sovereignty’ over Syria’s Golan Heights. The strategically important Golan Heights are recognised in international law and by the UN as being Syrian territory which was seized by the state of Israel during the Six-Day War in 1969.
In 1981,...
A DERAILMENT in Lewisham south London is a case in point about why guards must be kept on the trains, transport union RMT said yesterday following the release of a safety report into a potentially lethal incident where passengers ‘self-evacuated’ onto icy and electrically live tracks. RMT said that a...
A STRIKE wave is spreading across South Korea as workers in various industries fight in defence of their pay and conditions, while union membership is also rapidly increasing as a measure of the increase in class conflict. Workers at Hanwha Total Petrochemicals Co went on a general strike on Saturday...
INDICATIVE votes will take place today, Tory Leader of the House of Commons, Andrea Leadsom confirmed yesterday afternoon, after which the Withdrawal Bill amendment to extend Article 50 and delay Brexit will be brought forward ‘for consideration’. Legally the UK is still bound to leave the EU on March 29th,...
It is ‘outrageous’ that King’s College London (KCL) singled out pro-Palestinian student activists and blocked their access cards as a ‘security measure’ ahead of the Queen’s visit to the campus on March 19. Mehreen, one of the students who was barred, said: ‘I got my ID card. I tapped it...
PM MAY, having refused to quit the EU on March 29th which is still the official legal date for leaving, has paid the political price, with anti-Brexit MPs on Monday taking control of House of Commons business as part of their anti-Brexit coup! The government was defeated by 329 votes...
‘IT IS TIME for Parliament to take control,’ Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said yesterday, responding to Tory PM May’s statement to Parliament on the Brexit crisis. He confirmed that Labour will be backing the amendment calling for a number of indicative votes. Corbyn began his speech by thanking her for meetings...
PROTESTERS picketed South African mining company Lonmin’s AGM in central London yesterday, demanding it pays compensation to the families of mineworkers killed in a shooting during a strike in 2012. They also called on South African authorities to release mineworkers still imprisoned after the protests. In August 2012, South African police...
JERUSALEM – Thousands marched in the funeral procession on Sunday afternoon of 24-year-old Palestinian, Habib al-Masri, who was killed during night protests in the northern besieged Gaza Strip. Thousands of mourners carried al-Masri’s body on their shoulders from his home in Beit Hanoun to the local mosque before burial in...
IN 2013, foreign brands and unions signed an Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, and although workers who need to complain against poor working conditions now trust more in the system, women are still harassed, and workers laid off arbitrarily or pressured to increase production. Working conditions have...
THE US aircraft manufacturer Boeing has been brought to its knees following two catastrophic crashes of its bestselling aircraft, the short haul 737 Max 8, which cost the lives of 346 people. Last October a Lion Air flight in Indonesia crashed with the loss of 189 lives when pilots failed...
PM MAY was holed up in crisis talks with senior Tories including Boris Johnson and Michael Gove at Chequers yesterday, with rumours that a a cabinet coup was underway to oust her. However, Chancellor Hammond said such talk was ‘self indulgent’ and Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay claimed May ‘is in...
ON SATURDAY thousands of Swindon football fans showed their determination to fight to keep the Honda car factory open, which is an absolute life line for the future of the town. #SaveHondaSwindon campaigners were joined by a giant ad van emblazoned with the demand to the car giant to remain...
THE Trump administration in the USA has asked Congress to approve – as part of its fiscal 2020 budget – legislation that will make it easier to fire or to discipline federal workers. It would also seek to ‘make a series of pro-management changes to the law governing collective bargaining...
ON FRIDAY PM MAY let it be known that if she did not think that her EU deal would be agreed by parliament she would not move it, and in its place a number of indicative motions would be allowed, so that parliament could decide what it wanted. With that...
THE family of a 73-year-old French woman injured in a police charge at a protest are taking legal action. Geneviève Legay fell and hit her head on a metal post during the banned ‘yellow vest’ demonstration in Nice. The incident, captured on video by demonstrators and journalists, is being investigated. Ms Legay,...
ANOTHER round of council cuts is set to devastate services for young people in London, with more than £1 million of cuts planned for the 2019-20 financial year, revealed in new research yesterday by Green London Assembly Member, Sian Berry. Building on the body of research she has been working...
THE UNITE trade union, the largest in Britain, is calling for a suspension of the privatisation of all cervical cancer screening services in NHS laboratories nationwide – in the wake of reports the service is approaching ‘meltdown’. Unite warned earlier this week that the crisis will worsen further if tenders...
A General strike was held in Rahat City in southern Israel yesterday, against Israel’s rampant demolitions of Palestinian homes in Israel. Israeli bulldozers demolished two Palestinian-owned buildings and a wall in Wadi Ara region, in northern Israel on Monday, while a Palestinian resident of the Qalansuwa City in central Israel...
A SHOCKING Heads of Midwifery (HOMS) survey published yesterday by the Royal College of Midwives (RCM) reveals that nearly half do not have enough staff to meet demand. It also shows that pregnancies are becoming increasingly complex, that there is a lack of specialist midwives and that midwifery vacancy levels...
TRADE union Unite, the UK and Ireland’s biggest union, has branded a pay ‘offer’ to its 500 members employed by the company Amey undertaking prison maintenance work – as a farcical ‘lucky dip’. And as can be seen, the histories recounted below show above all how so-called ‘outsourcing’ in fact...
HUNGARY’S Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto last Tuesday opened a trade office in Jerusalem City, in the central occupied West Bank, that will have an official ‘diplomatic status’. The new diplomatic trade office is considered a ‘branch’ of the Central European country’s embassy in Israel, which will remain in Tel Aviv. During...
THE shortage of NHS staff in England has reached the point where patients are being warned that they will have to get used to seeing pharmacists or physiotherapists instead of GPs because the NHS will never be in a position to recruit and train enough family doctors or nurses...
TWO HUNDRED civil servants employed at the International House Tax Office in Ealing Broadway west London went on strike yesterday, determined to defend their jobs and refusing to be transferred to Stratford in east London. They came streaming out of the office at midday to cheers from a waiting crowd...
Annual workforce figures released on Tuesday by The Royal College of Radiologists (RCR) reveal the ‘dire’ staff shortages at cancer centres across the UK. Clinical oncology leaders question how the NHS will be able to roll out cutting-edge life-saving innovations – such as immunotherapy drugs and high energy proton beam...
PM MAY confirmed yesterday that she will be running off today to meet with EU president Donald Tusk to beg for an extension to Article 50 past the deadline for the UK to leave the EU on March 29. Her plea is that an extension until June 30 would provide...
THE US is handing millions of dollars of cash over to the White Helmets organisation, the Syrian and Russian coordination committees said on Tuesday. The committees, which fight for the return of displaced Syrians also said that the US is forcibly detaining displaced Syrians in al-Rukban camp in disastrous conditions. In...
PATIENTS suffering from serious and chronic illnesses have been driven to the brink of homlessness after being declared ‘fit-for-work’ and thrown off their benefits. This is all because the Department of Work (DWP) and Pensions is instructing GPs not to issue ‘fit notes’. This scandalous news has prompted the welfare...
Extremist Israeli settlers set up a big tent at a roundabout leading to the village of Kifl Hares, north of the occupied West Bank city of Salfit on Monday. A large group of settlers are currently inside the tent, under heavy protection of Israeli forces. Palestinians fear that the tent is...
‘Philanthropy and the privatisation of the democratic state: who needs a Ministry of Education?’ ironically ask the authors of a new report which sheds light on the unprecedented role of ‘philanthropic’ actors in education policy-making. The report, launched by Education International (EI), the global education union confederation, lifts the lid...
SPEAKER Bercow’s ruling, preventing PM May making a third attempt to get her deal with the EU through the House of Commons, was a conscious attempt on behalf of the ‘Remain’ majority in Parliament to make sure that even May’s semi-break with the EU, including its notorious northern Irish...
‘WHAT the government cannot legitimately do is to re-submit to the House the same proposition, or substantially the same proposition as that of last week which was rejected by 149 votes,’ the Speaker John Bercow said yesterday in an unprecedented political intervention, ruling out May’s attempts to have a...