Monthly Archives: March 2020
STOCK indexes were recovering some ground yesterday after the huge record falls on Thursday. ‘There is a sense of fear and panic,’ said James Tao, an analyst at stockbroker Commsec in Sydney. ‘It's one of those situations where there is so much uncertainty that no-one quite knows how to respond. ‘If...
COSATU – The Confederation of South African Trade Unions – has held a Central Executive Committee workshop to discuss a number of pertinent issues for the federation to respond to, and one such issue was the COVID-19 virus and the impact that it will have on workers in general. Workers...
GLOBAL stock markets crashed on Thursday, the biggest single day fall in history. This is the historic crisis of capitalism, its death agony. The coronavirus has exposed the inherent weakness of the system, a system drowning in debt where trillions of pieces of paper have been masquerading as value...
THE GLOBAL economy nosedived as soon as markets opened yesterday morning with shares around the world haemorrhaging. Once more at the start of US trading, shares plunged so fast and so deeply that it triggered an automatic temporary suspension in trading aimed at curbing panic-selling. The main US and UK share...
THE TRADE union leaders are divided over the Tory Budget. ‘Today’s Budget u-turn on spending is long overdue’ says the TUC, forging a partnership with the Tories.
‘The priority now must be to repair the damage of ten years of Tory devastation.
‘Helping working families and rebuilding public services must come first....
CHANCELLOR Rishi Sunak opened his Budget speech on Wednesday with an appeal to ‘put aside party politics, and act in the national interest’ in order to confront the economic and social crisis that is overwhelming British capitalism. TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady was quick to respond to this call. In her...
TORY Chancellor Rishi Sunak has unveiled a £30bn Budget package to try to keep UK capitalism from being bankrupted and broken apart by the Coronavirus crisis. He is abolishing business rates for many firms in England, extending sick pay and boosting NHS funding. He warned of a ‘significant but temporary disruption’...
THE NHS Long Term Plan (LTPlan), and national GP contract reform in England: ‘Investment and Evolution – a five year framework for GP contract reform to implement the NHS Long Term Plan’ were published in quick succession in January 2019 with very little publicity. Yet these secretly imposed changes heralded...
THE NEW Tory chancellor of the exchequer, Rishi Sunak, yesterday painted a picture of British capitalism as fundamentally ‘robust’ while the NHS was ‘sound’ – all, he claimed, the result of ten years of Tory austerity cuts. The only cloud on the horizon was the coronavirus outbreak, a temporary blip...
A Hamas spokes-man has condemned the continued detention and prosecution of Palestinian figures in Saudi Arabia over their support for the Palestinian resistance movement, and has urged Riyadh to immediately release them. ‘The national and pan-Arabism duty requires honouring those people and not trying them in this way,’ Hazim Qassim told...
THE SCENE has been set for today’s budget by the crash of the stockmarkets on Monday March 9th when trillions of pounds were wiped off global stock markets in what is being called a ‘New Black Monday’. More than £124 billion was wiped off the FTSE100, the biggest crash since...
THE SYRIAN Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) says Turkey has so far sent more than 4,500 allied Takfiri terrorists from Syria to Libya, after the Turkish parliament passed a bill earlier this year to allow the government to deploy forces to the North African country to intervene in the...
CORONAVIRUS sent the world’s stock markets crashing when they opened yesterday morning, with £100 billion wiped off the value of London’s top listed companies. Leading the collapse were the giant energy companies Shell and BP, as oil prices crashed by 30% in the wake of Saudi Arabia cutting the price...
AT UNIVERSITY College London (UCL) over fifty students occupied the Cloister Building at 7am yesterday morning in front of the Provost’s office, and plan to block it for at least the duration of the lecturers’ strike. They have tents, and it will be a 24-hour occupation. News Line spoke to...
TORY Chancellor Rishi Sunak said yesterday that the NHS will get ‘whatever resources it needs’ to cope with a coronavirus epidemic. He alleged to the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show that the Tories had produced ‘strong’ economic foundations that meant he could provide additional funding.
Sunak pledged to address the coronavirus outbreak...
SIXTY Unison nursing delegates gathered in Warwick last week for the ‘safe staffing forum’ in which the worforce crisis in the NHS was discussed. The conference demanded a legal minimum safe staffing level, stating that the anything less that one staff to eight patients puts lives at risk. Unison national...
ON FRIDAY £60 billion was wiped off the UK’s leading companies. The FTSE 100 plunged by 3.62%. In the US a rate cut saw shares crash and a rush into gold, as the world economy drowned in a vast indebtedness. In Europe, Italy has quarantined up to 16 million people...
‘OPEN the doors to the refugees,’ demanded 20,000 marchers in Athens on Thursday. Some 20,000 people marched through Athens on Thursday night calling for the Greek borders to be opened and allow refugees to cross from Turkey. It was a militant and angry march with dozens of large banners stating, ‘We...
GMB UNION members working for Wilko are furious over a threat that the company is to turn on them and impose draconian cuts. It is already set to slash sickness pay for tens of thousands of retail and distribution workers. The company plans to cut sick pay entitlement for every...
LOW-COST British airline Flybe has collapsed with the loss of 2,000 jobs. The pilots union BALPA has put the blame squarely on the Tory government for refusing to bail Flybe out, despite promising to do so. The GMB union has now warned of a ‘domino effect’ putting ‘1,400 jobs in...
‘FLYBE staff feel disgusted at this betrayal and these broken promises,’ pilots union BALPA General Secretary Brian Strutton said yesterday as the news broke that Flybe has collapsed with the loss of 2,000 jobs. The union blamed the government for refusing to bail Flybe out. Strutton said: ‘2,000 staff members...
JAGUAR Land Rover is to shut its Halewood plant in Merseyside for nine days, in the latest development in the sharpening car manufacture crisis. Jaguar has denied that the decision has come as a result of the spread of coronavirus. However, car manufacturers around the world have been severely affected...
THE TURKISH military has announced the death of at least one of its soldiers and the injury of nine others in an attack in the north western Syrian province of Idlib. Turkey’s Defence Ministry said the casualties took place on Tuesday, adding that the latest death would bring the total...
THE RACE to become the Democratic Party candidate to face Trump in November’s presidential election has come down to a fight between the democratic socialist candidate Bernie Sanders and the right-wing’s candidate Joe Biden. The crowded field of candidates was dramatically culled this week following ‘Super Tuesday’, the day when...
UNITE has expressed its alarm at the announcement yesterday that Barclays bank is closing a major processing centre in Leeds with nearly 800 jobs lost and cutting another 345 jobs across the country. Barclays has informed around 800 staff in its Millshaw Court office that the centre will permanently close...
NEWS LINE is pleased to publish the following eyewitness account from Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, of part of the extradition hearing of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. The hearings at Woolwich Crown Court began on Monday February 24. IN LAST THURSDAY’S separate hearing on allowing Assange out of...
FOR THE first time since coronavirus erupted in China shutting down Chinese manufacturing, cutting off the supply of vital components and commodities to the rest of the world, a trade union in Britain, Unite, has addressed the devastating impact this will have on the lives of workers. Despite all the...
FOLLOWING the successes of the Syrian army’s drive into Idlib province, President Erdogan of Turkey has begun to carry out his revenge policy. Since the EU is not prepared to assist Turkey in Syria, where the Assad government is supported by Russia and Iran, ‘millions’ of refugees are being encouraged...
‘SHUT down the inquiry, it’s a disgrace!’ protesters shouted outside the Grenfell inquiry yesterday, on the first day it resumed after the Attorney General had ruled in favour of the cladding companies. The new Attorney General, Suella Braverman, ruled that anything said in the inquiry cannot be used in a...
THE BANK of England yesterday vowed that it would ride to the rescue of the world’s financial markets by joining with other central banks to ‘ensure all necessary steps are taken to protect financial and monetary stability’ from the impact of the coronavirus. The Bank’s pledge followed the lead of...
‘JUST days away from its third General Election in less than a year, Israel launched another attack on the Gaza Strip which began with a war crime when a military bulldozer dragged the corpse of Mohammed Al-Naim in front of journalists and in broad daylight. The Palestinian resistance responded...
FRIENDS and family, concerned members of the North Kensington community and local campaigners joined forces on Saturday evening to demand justice for El, a university student and young worker at the Duke of Wellington pub who suffered a racist attack. On Saturday February 15th at 11.15pm inside The Duke of...
THE Government of Japan has signed a contribution agreement worth $22.4 million with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for Palestine refugees in the Near East, aimed at reinforcing the agency’s services to Palestinian refugees in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. Of...
THE French government has chosen the moment – when France, Europe and the world is obsessed by the coronavirus crisis – to launch a coup against its own parliament. On Saturday, the French Prime Minister Édouard Philippe pushed through the Macron government’s controversial pension reforms proposals, to slash workers’ pensions...
