Monthly Archives: June 2020
MORE THAN 50 people have been ‘unlawfully arrested’ under the ‘draconian’ Coronavirus Act, it emerged yesterday, yet the government are insisting that the laws remain. The Tories have reiterated their refusal to repeal the Coronavirus Act, which came into effect in March. A review by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has...
YESTERDAY Boris Johnson set out his policy to rescue British capitalism through spending limitless billions of pounds on investing in everything and anything: ‘infrastructure, transport, broadband – you name it’ he said. Johnson proclaimed he was committed to the New Deal polices carried out in the US during the 1930s...
HOME SECRETARY Priti Patel yesterday warned that the city of Leicester may be facing a localised lockdown after a rise in coronavirus cases. She said it is ‘correct’ that the government is considering the move after about 25% of Leicester’s 2,494 confirmed Covid-19 cases were reported in the two weeks...
By Fra Hughes IRISH Republican Socialist group Lasair Dhearg has joined the street battles ranging from Minneapolis to Bristol to Belfast in confronting the legacy of colonialism, its enduring legacy and unchallenged history.
The latest brutal murder of a black man at the hands of American law enforcement, George Floyd in...
‘FREE Julian Assange!’ demanded a 20-strong demonstration outside the Home Office on Friday mid-day. Addressing the protest Emmy Butlin of the Julian Assange Defence Committee said: ‘Successive Conservative governments have ignored the report by Nils Melzer the UN special rapporteur on torture which said that Julian Assange has been a...
THE Fire Brigades Union (FBU) has vowed to fight ‘unthinkable’ proposals to cut the budget for the London Fire Brigade by £25m over two years, as part of the Labour Mayor of London’s £500m saving plans. The FBU has condemned the ‘huge damage to the fire service’ left over from...
AMERICAN postal workers in Minneapolis are saying Black Lives Matter as over 400 local trade unionists signed a petition calling on workers to resist helping the police suppress the protests. In the past month, the brutal police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis has led to mass protests across the...
LABOUR leader Sir Keir Starmer has unceremoniously sacked shadow education secretary Rebecca Long-Bailey. This is the MP who was the main contender standing against Starmer in the leadership election. Long-Bailey, a firm supporter of former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and his socialist policies, was on Corbyn’s frontbench team. Following Labour’s defeat...
EXPERTS have heavily criticised the Tories’ ‘ad hoc system’ for coronavirus tracking, testing and contact tracing, stating that the government’s ‘abysmal response’ means that many suspected cases will have been missed while other professionals are questioning whether the anti-body tests fundamentally can actually tell us anything at all. In a...
LESS than two weeks after schools re-opened in South Africa, there have been growing calls to suspend schooling as many schools have recorded positive Covid-19 cases. ‘We have seen a rise in infections at a high speed in all provinces since the reopening of schools,’ said Kabelo Mahlobogwane, spokesperson for...
THE International Monetary Fund (IMF) warned yesterday that the Covid-19 crisis could cost the global economy a staggering £9.5 trillion in the biggest hit to growth since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Back in April, the IMF was despairing that global growth would fall by 3% now it is...
Police forces across the USA have committed widespread human rights violations against Black Lives Matter protesters, Amnesty International said on Tuesday, as it launched a detailed interactive map of more than 100 incidents of police violence. Amnesty has documented 125 separate examples of police violence against protesters in 40 states...
IN THE week that Boris Johnson boasted that the lifting of coronavirus lockdown measures heralded the start of the economic ‘bounce back’, it became crystal clear that British capitalism is in fact bouncing over the cliff into an economic crash. Such is the depth of the crisis that the Bank...
THE UNITE and GMB trade unions have appealed to the government to announce a bespoke financial package to save the beleaguered aviation industry. The two unions’ representing Swissport workers, described the company’s decision to cut at least 4,556 jobs as ‘devastating news’.
Swissport is the country’s largest ground handler; handling flights...
DESPITE announcing yesterday a seven-day rolling average of 130 people a day dying from Covid-19, Tory PM Johnson announced measures to ‘safely ease the lockdown in England’. Johnson said: ‘We can change the two-metre rule from the 4th July. This rule makes it impossible for large parts of the economy...
‘WE’RE being treated as disposable,’ striking New Orleans sanitation workers employed by Metro Services Disposal Group said last Friday. The workers began striking on May 5th, saying they weren’t being given proper safety equipment or paid sick leave.
The group of sanitation workers, also known as ‘hoppers’ (because they hop on and off...
FORMER TORY Chancellor Sajid Javid has warned against a return to austerity as the bankrupt UK economy plunges into a historic disaster with its debt much greater than its Gross Domestic Product. The Bank of England (BoE) on June 18th unleashed yet another round of Quantitative Easing (QE), adding another...
YESTERDAY, campaigners marked the 72nd anniversary of the landing of the Empire Windrush, bringing hundreds people to live and work here from the Caribbean, by launching legal action against the Home Office to demand that the ‘Hostile Environment’ is scrapped. Pushed by the Tories, when ex-PM Theresa May was Home...
MORE than two million garment workers have been sacked in Bangladesh since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. Because of fewer orders from the United States and Europe, more than 1,000 factories have closed and more than two million workers have become unemployed.
Conversely, the prices of food, rents and other...
INTERVIEWED on Sky’s Sophy Ridge programme on Sunday, TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady appealed for the Tories to unite with the TUC, saying: ‘Let’s get our act together,’ as thousands of UK firms and businesses will go ‘over the cliff’ in October when the government’s furlough scheme ends. O’Grady offered...
TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady said yesterday that the jobs market is on ‘red alert’, with thousands of firms set to go ‘over a cliff’ in October when the government’s furlough scheme ends. Instead of putting forward a policy of occupation and nationalisation to defend all jobs, she proposed to...
SOUTH Africa’s mining companies have recorded hundreds of Covid-19 cases, with most not complying with government measures – and also not complying with requirements to screen and test their workers. With the number of Covid-19 positive cases expected to surge beyond 500,000 before the end of the winter season, it...
THE BMA’s just-published Survey of Doctors reveals the depth of the crisis that the Tory government has plunged the NHS into, as a result of its complete lack of preparation for the coronavirus pandemic, despite the grave warnings given to it by the report into the findings of Exercise...
Last Sunday night in Bolivia around 10pm, 220 police, armed and accompanied by trained dogs, surrounded Mexico’s Embassy in La Paz. According to a statement released by the Bartolina Sisa Resistance organisation, it was an attempt to seize the seven former government ministers who worked with exiled former President Evo...
AROUND 20 unemployed workers are chasing every job vacancy in poorer parts of the UK, with that number rising to 50 in the areas worst affected by coronavirus, a study shows. The Institute for Employment Studies (IES) said ex-industrial and inner city areas like Broxtowe in East Midlands and Brent...
THE SAVE Southend NHS Campaign has learnt from separate senior hospital sources that staff at Southend ITU (Intensive Therapy Unit) have been told there is to be a loss of a significant number of critical care beds at the hospital. Its press statement reads: ‘Currently, Southend has 14 beds across...
IN EGYPT, six doctors and two pharmacists have been arrested, and medics transferred to quarantine hospitals for speaking out, said Amnesty International on Thursday. A pregnant doctor was detained after her phone was used to report a coronavirus case, the rights group added. ‘The Egyptian authorities are handling the Covid-19 crisis...
IT HAS been three years since the horrific Grenfell fire which killed 72 men, women and children. Three years and there are still seven Grenfell families who remain homeless. Three years and there are still 2,000 blocks across the country wrapped in flammable cladding for years ahead. Tens of thousands...
POOR housing conditions contributed to the disproportionate amount of people who have died of Covid-19 in poverty-stricken communities, a new report released yesterday by Public Health England (PHE) revealed. The report states: ‘Transmission, morbidity and mortality rates of Covid-19 have been exacerbated in areas where there are poor housing conditions...
THE BANK of England (BoE) yesterday unleashed another round of Quantitative Easing (QE), adding another £100 billion to the amount of ‘free’ money they have handed out to the speculators and banks in an increasingly desperate attempt to kick-start British capitalism. Since the coronavirus pandemic hit the UK back in...
NATIONWIDE demonstrations in France on Tuesday demanding better pay and resources for health workers were the subject of repeated police attacks. 18,000 people attended demonstrations in Paris during a national health workers strike. Police fired tear gas to try to disperse hundreds of masked protesters who responded by throwing stones and...
AN IUF global union statement last Friday reminded that a determined campaign by IUF affiliates and allies has beaten back a government attempt to remove a hard won health and safety protection for meat and poultry processing workers in Brazil. As in many other countries, meat and poultry plants in...
THIS week Tory prime minister Boris Johnson was forced to make a humiliating retreat over free school meals following a campaign led by the young football player Marcus Rashford. As far as the Tories were concerned, the money spent on keeping 1.3 million kids from hunger was a waste, money...
THE UK has had over 63,000 excess deaths during the coronavirus pandemic, the highest in Europe. The Office of National Statistics, (ONS) calculates excess deaths by examining the death certificates of everyone who has died during the pandemic, in hospitals, care homes and in private homes in England and Wales. The...
JAGUAR LANDROVER has plunged to a £500m loss in the first three months of this year. The Unite trade union has described the announcement that 1,100 agency workers at JLR’s factories will lose their jobs as ‘more devastating news for the UK’s automotive communities’. It is understood that there will...
ISRAEL has sentenced a Palestinian child, Hammoudeh Khader Sheikh, to 10 years in prison, Quds News Network reported yesterday. The boy, 15, from occupied East Jerusalem, southern West Bank, was shot and injured by occupation soldiers on August 15, 2019, while with his friend Naseem Imkafeh, 15, whom the soldiers...
IN A world of depleting resources and contracting economies, states are preparing for future uprisings by a growing underclass. It is hard to ignore the striking parallels between the recent scenes of police brutality in cities across the United States and decades of violence from Israel’s security forces against Palestinians. A...
ON THE very day that Boris Johnson hailed the start of the economic bounce-back for capitalism with a return to work, the international stock markets delivered a crushing blow. Stock markets around the world fell as the speculators began to realise that all the talk from governments about having conquered...
'IT'S been an absolute outrage that three years later and the Grenfell families still have no justice, and homes are still unsafe,’ Joe Delaney, local resident, activist and Grenfell campaigner said yesterday. He was speaking outside Ladbroke Grove Tube at a street meeting and mass campaign called by the North...
TOMORROW, June 16th, everyone is being mobilised (striking) for health, the CGT French union federation has declared. Health, medico-social, social, nursing homes and national education personnel will be mobilised to demand substantial resources for good working conditions, thus ensuring a quality public service for all users and patients.
They will also...
TORY CHANCELLOR Rishi Sunak did the rounds of press interviews yesterday preparing the way for today’s reopening of non-essential shops and businesses and he made it crystal clear that health and safety came a very distant second to the absolute imperative of driving workers back to work and shoppers...
ANTI-RACISM protesters who tear down, ‘deface’ or graffiti statues and monuments to imperialism face jail sentences of up to 10 years under a forthcoming bill which Tory Home Secretary Priti Patel is to bring before Parliament. The Desecration of War Memorials Bill, which is backed by 125 Tory MPs, is...