Monthly Archives: April 2019
AUSTRALIA’S MEAA (Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance) union has written to the British and Australian governments to oppose the extradition to the United States of its member, Wikileaks founder and publisher, Julian Assange. MEAA was formed in 1992 from the merger of three unions – the Australian Journalists Association, Actors Equity of...
Education professionals are reporting a significant increase in the visibility of child poverty in their school/college and have provided many distressing examples from daily life. In advance of the National Education Union’s annual conference in Liverpool this week (15-18 April), more than 8,000 teachers, school leaders and support staff from...
THOUSANDS of Libyans have been forced out of their homes as fighting rages in the capital Tripoli between the forces of the UN-recognised ‘Government of National Accord’ (GNA) of Fayez al-Sarraj, and those of the powerful warlord General Khalifa Haftar. Haftar, who heads the so-called Libyan National Army (LNA), is...
May Day March
Victory to world revolution!
Quit the EU Now!
Kick the Tories out! For a workers government & Socialism!
End Israeli occupation of Palestine!
US keep out of Venezuela!
Release Ocalan from Turkish prison!
Release all Palestinian prisoners! Date: Wednesday, 1st May 2019 Assemble: 11am at Clerkenwell Green, London EC1R...
FORMER Tory Party leader Iain Duncan Smith called for Prime Minister Theresa May to quit before the European elections in May. Appearing on Sky’s Sophy Ridge Show he warned against participating in them saying they would be a ‘disaster’ for the Tory Party. Duncan Smith emphasised: ‘We simply cannot fight the...
THE NATIONAL Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) said last Wednesday that it is forging ahead with a month-long strike at the local subsidiary of multinational steel manufacturer ArcelorMittal. Neither ArcelorMittal, nor the British High Commission office were immediately available for comment. Numsa has revealed its strike plan after its...
US SENATOR Bernie Sanders, who has said he intends to run the first unionised Presidential campaign in history, announced last Monday a policy proposal sure to resonate with that base: banning right-to-work laws. ‘When billionaires like the Koch brothers spend millions of dollars successfully lobbying for so-called ‘‘right to work’’...
WITH THE EUROPEAN ELECTIONS fast approaching, the bourgeois democratic system through which the capitalist ruling class has ruled over the working class in the UK is in full meltdown. An Electoral Calculus Poll of polls has found that a general election would see Labour winning 296 seats against 259 for...
BRITISH Steel is seeking a £100m loan from the government in order to meet an EU emission rules attack. Previously, the company could have used EU-issued carbon credits to settle its 2018 pollution bill. However, the steel maker has been affected by a European Union decision to suspend UK firms’ access...
ECUADORIANS have taken to the streets in the capital Quito against the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in the country’s embassy in London. The arrest came after Quito suddenly revoked his seven-year asylum and handed him over to British authorities. Police were invited into the embassy by Ecuador’s ambassador on...
HUNDREDS of school youth staged a strike for climate change in Parliament Square yesterday. Lana Daly came with friends from west London and said: ‘The government needs to implement a strategy that cares for the environment. ‘They need to listen to the science. ‘They just don’t seem to care about what happens...
ON Wednesday News Line visited the hunger strikers at the Kurdish Assembly in Haringey. It was the 27th day of their indefinite strike having joined with thousands around the world who have taken on this struggle to demand the end to the isolation of the Kurdish People’s leader Abdullah Ocalan,...
BRITISH police entered the Ecuadorian embassy in central London on Thursday, which is technically Ecuadorian territory, arrested WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the Australian who had held Ecuadorian citizenship for the last seven years and was under that country’s protection, and dragged him out of the embassy, bundling him into...
WIKILEAKS co-founder Julian Assange was forcibly arrested and dragged out of the Ecuadorian embassy in London yesterday. In an unprecedented move the embassy allowed the British police in, despite Assange being an Ecuadorian citizen under their protection. Assange took refuge in the embassy seven years ago to avoid extradition to...
A PROPOSAL by fire chiefs to expand a firefighter’s role at will and without boundaries has been overwhelming rejected by firefighters by 97%. The proposals would see firefighters’ roles expanded so that they would be doing the job of ambulance workers, something that the Fire Brigades Union is opposed to. ‘Firstly,...
STORES, banks and other businesses are disappearing at the fastest rate since 2010 a PwC survey has revealed with 2,461 shop closures in 2018. 3,372 shops opened during 2018 and 5,833 closed, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) research compiled by the Local Data Company (LDC). Lisa Hooker, the consumer markets leader at...
IRELAND’S elected representatives are coming under pressure from corporate lobbyists to drop a proposed ban on goods from Israel’s settlements in the occupied West Bank. A briefing paper submitted to members of the Oireachtas – the Irish parliament – warns there may be a hostile response from the US if...
BOTH the sheer bankruptcy of British capitalism and the impotence of Tory Prime Minister Theresa May were on public display on Wednesday night as she turned up in Brussels to beg the 27 EU states for an extension of Article 50. Article 50, which is supposed to trigger the UK...
DURING the House of Commons Prime Ministers Questions yesterday, both Tory PM May and Labour leader Corbyn avoided the burning issue of the hour, Brexit, creating a massive ‘elephant in the room’. The Labour leadership and the Tory leaders have been engaged in joint talks all week in an attempt...
‘WE REMAIN opposed to any attempt to turn firefighters into law enforcement, either in Devon and Somerset, or elsewhere in the country,’ Dave Green, Fire Brigades Union (FBU) national officer said yesterday. He was responding to the shock announcement that firefighters have been trained up as special police constables dubbed...
PCS CATERING workers at the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), working for contractor Aramark were in confident mood on the third day of strike action for the London Living Wage. PCS branch chair at the BEIS told News Line: ‘We had a 100% vote for this strike...
In its report Scotland in the Red released on Tuesday, StepChange Debt Charity Scotland reveals that thousands of households in Scotland are being driven into soaring levels of unrepayable debt due to huge household bills – especially Council Tax. The charity was contacted by over 30,000 people last year seeking...
SIXTEEN years on from the start of the illegal US-led invasion of Iraq, further evidence has emerged that the war was planned long before the attack took place and that the stated reason for it, ie ‘Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction’ was bogus. Speaking before the House of Commons Constitutional...
ON TUESDAY night, Theresa May suffered yet one more humiliation at the hands of her own party when almost 100 Tory MPs voted against her plea for Parliament to beg the EU for a three-month extension to Article 50. Included in those voting against were six members of her own...
Churchill Security is based in Chorley and employs more than 160 people in the UK, including Cardiff Bay, Cheltenham, Watford, Milton Keynes, Bromley, Abingdon and London. The company is forcing their workforce to download special software onto their phones which allows their every location to be tracked. GMB demanded: ‘Churchill must...
cleaners working for ISS on the Arriva Rail North contract will be holding a protest today, Wednesday 10th April, outside Manchester Victoria station between 7am and 9am. The protest is over plans by private contractor ISS to unilaterally change the low paid workers’ terms and conditions so that they will...
DOCTOR Hadiza Bawa-Garba, who was struck off the medical register, has won a further victory and will now be allowed to start working as a doctor again, the General Medical Council (GMC) said yesterday afternoon. The Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MPTS) ruled yesterday that her fitness to practise remains ‘impaired’...
VENEZUELA’S President Nicolas Maduro has calledfor dialogue to settle political differences and achieve national peace. ‘Let’s put all our cards on the table and halt the terrorist attacks and ambushes,’ Maduro said on Sunday. He stressed Venezuela’s willingness to engage in dialogue as a mechanism to settle political differences, for peace and to prevent...
THE HOUSE of Commons on Monday night voted by 390 votes to 81 to turn a House of Lords resolution into legislation that bans the UK government leaving the EU without a deal on April 12th, instructing the PM to agree to an extension of the negotiating period with...
OUTSOURCED workers, who provide catering and cleaning services in government offices, took the first of three days of strike yesterday demanding the London Living Wage. From early yesterday morning they were on the picket line outside the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, (BEIS) ironically the very department which...
a fifth of lettings advertised in Wales explicitly exclude people in receipt of housing benefit, a practice the homelessness charity Shelter Cymru has labelled ‘completely discriminatory’. In a survey carried out jointly by the National Housing Federation (NHF) and Shelter, of the 2,780 Welsh property adverts examined, 576 were so-called...
TURKEY has strongly censured Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for promising to annex settlements in the West Bank if re-elected, saying that his ‘irresponsible’ statement will not change the status of the occupied Palestinian territory. Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said in a tweet on Sunday: ‘The West Bank is Palestinian territory...
A BLOODBATH is being predicted in Libya after the leader of the so-called Libyan National Army (LNA), General Khalifa Haftar, launched a military offensive against the capital Tripoli aimed at smashing the ‘Government of National Accord’ (GNA) imposed on Libya by American imperialism and recognised by the UN as...
THE LABOUR Party would ‘consider very, very strongly’ voting to revoke Article 50 to block a no-deal Brexit this Friday, Shadow Business Secretary Rebecca Long-Bailey warned yesterday morning. Speaking on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show, she said Labour would ‘keep all options in play to keep no deal off the...
‘THIS IS bad news for staff and for patients,’ Unison’s head of health Sara Gorton has warned. ‘The changes are built on savings from employing new recruits on worse pay, conditions and pension scheme, as well as slashing the trust’s VAT liability. ‘Privatisation at Chesterfield Royal Hospital will drive out staff...
IN A HISTORIC move, Brown University in Rhode Island has become the first US Ivy League institution to pass a student referendum supporting divestment from companies complicit in Israel’s human rights violations. The Brown vote follows a similar divestment resolution passed by the student government at Swarthmore College in early...
IN LAST Friday’s letter to EU President Donald Tusk the Prime Minister, Theresa May, made it very clear that she had surrendered to the anti-Brexiteer majority of MPs and Lords. Without shame, the woman who began her campaign to carry out Brexit declaiming ‘no deal is better than a bad...
Refugee families at the Athens Railway Station and at the Diavata refugee camp outside Thessaloniki, northern Greece, were ferociously attacked by riot police last Friday and throughout the weekend. The refugee families were trying to reach the Greece-North Macedonia border, about 50km north of Thessaloniki, hoping to reach central Europe. These...
PALESTINE has demanded an immediate international criminal investigation into the Tel Aviv regime’s policy of settlement expansion and expropriation of Palestinian territories. The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates announced in a statement yesterday that the ongoing settlement expansion at the expense of Palestinian land erodes the credibility of...
ON FRIDAY, PM May wrote a grovelling surrender letter of complete capitulation to the EU President Donald Tusk, in which she agreed that the UK would undergo a process of national humiliation by taking part in the May European elections, and that she would even respect a parliamentary majority...
‘WE need rise of pay! RMT here to stay!’ shouted over 40 striking cleaners outside Arriva Rail’s London head office in Swiss Cottage yesterday morning. RMT rep Josephine Eksoh told News Line: ‘We are demanding the London Living wage of £10.55 an hour plus the RPI and backdated to January...
THE SOCIALIST Revolutionary Workers Party (SRWP) of South Africa was founded in March this year as a communist, Marxist-Leninist party, after a pre-launch convention at the end of 2018 and immediately intends to stand in elections. ‘Labour brokers are bloodsuckers and a cancer which need to be rooted out for...
TORY PM Theresa May has written to the President of the European Council Donald Tusk begging for yet another delay to Brexit, this time until the 30th June. The UK is currently due to leave the EU on 12 April and, as no withdrawal deal has been approved by MPs,...