Monthly Archives: July 2020
OVER 500 angry NHS workers marched from St Thomas’ Hospital to Downing Street on Wednesday evening to demand a 15 per cent pay rise. ‘Enough is Enough,’ they loudly chanted, angry that they have been excluded from the public sector pay increase and are saying no to public sector pay...
‘THE South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU) has consistently opposed the need to borrow from the international financial institutions for reasons we will once more outline in this statement. We have noted with deep concern and anger that the International Monetary Fund issued a communication confirming that it has...
LLOYDS Bank, Britain’s biggest high street lender, yesterday announced that its profits for the first half of 2020 had been wiped out and that the UK economy was in for a greater economic shock than had been expected. Lloyds (which concentrates almost exclusively on UK banking and investment and is...
ZIMBABWE Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) president Peter Mutasa says the labour body will announce a series of dates for fresh protests after tomorrow’s Friday July 31 anti-corruption march. In an interview with NewsDay Midlands Reporter Brenna Matendere (ND), Peter Mutasa (PM) spoke about harassment of trade unionists by the...
THE damning report released yesterday by the Public Accounts Committee on the effect of Tory policies towards the elderly in care homes came as no surprise. Right from the very start of the coronavirus pandemic the clear policy of the Tories was to kick the elderly out of hospitals regardless...
THE Johnson government must answer for its actions over the 20,000 Care Home deaths says the GMB. Ministers ignored science, evidence and the GMB Union as 20,000 died in care homes. The cross-party Public Accounts Committee (PAC) said in a report that advising hospitals to discharge thousands of patients into care...
‘MAJOR questions will need to be answered by the Metropolitan Police as to how this everyday event escalated into an armed raid, during which deadly force could so easily and tragically have been unleashed upon Mina and her children,’ said solicitor Iain Gould in a blog post about the...
GOLD hit a record high on Wall Street on Monday as increasing numbers of frightened investors dumped the dollar and sought safety by purchasing gold, boosting the spot price to $1,944.92 an ounce, At the same time, the dollar index – which measures its price against a range of currencies...
THE PUBLIC Accounts Committee released a damning report this morning which condemns the Tories’ ‘slow, inconsistent and at times negligent approach’ to the social care sector in the Covid-19 pandemic. The Public Accounts Committee says the government’s approach has exposed the ‘tragic impact’ of ‘years of inattention, funding cuts and...
Trade unionists joined the Portland, Oregon demonstrations outside the Justice Centre on Saturday night, with many protesters wearing similar coloured shirts as part of an organised effort. Now the trade unions have begun to mobilise to defend the Portland protesters against brutal attacks from the state forces.
Teachers were wearing red,...
LAST Tuesday the emergency summit of leaders of the EU 27 member states finally agreed to a 750 billion euros pandemic recovery fund after five days of arguments and wrangling between the northern ‘frugal states’ and the mainly southern states whose already frail economies have been destroyed by the...
UNIVERSITY and College Union (UCU) yesterday launched action to support casualised staff. Over a third of all staff are on ‘fixed-term contracts’ rather than permanent jobs and thousands of posts are now under threat. At King’s College London over a thousand fixed-term staff have been told their contracts are under...
THE South African Municipal Workers’ Union (SAMWU) in Ekurhuleni is shocked and agitated that out of the blue, the City has provoked municipal workers and declared war against them. This is after the City informed workers that they will not be getting any salary increase this year. As per the salary...
FORTY-TWO THOUSAND British Airways workers have been sent letters from Director of Heathrow, Mel Birch, dated 15th July 2020, telling them that they face the sack by 31st August. The letter, along with the document that accompanies it, invites the 42,000 to apply for ‘voluntary redundancy’, emphasising that ‘this will...
ISRAELI police arrested 12 people and used water cannons before dawn on Sunday to disperse furious protesters against the policies of PM Netanyahu. Tens of thousands of Israelis demonstrated against joblessness, corruption, annexation and prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. At least 5,000 people converged on a square...
FOOD insecurity across Yemen is set to rise from two million to over three million in just six months, report UN agencies – who have now warned of an ‘alarming increase’ in the number of people facing ‘acute food insecurity’ in the war-hit country. On top of the crippling siege launched...
WHAT began as a Black Lives Matter movement sparked by the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis has developed into a nationwide movement against US capitalism and its leader President Trump. Trump has responded to mass protest marches against police brutality and mass unemployment in Portland, Oregon, by sending...
THE THREAT to cut health visitor and community nurse jobs in County Durham, while Covid-19 is still widespread, was branded as ‘incomprehensible’ by the Unite union yesterday. Harrogate and District NHS Foundation Trust (HDFT), which is taking over the County Durham 0-25 family health service contract from 1 September, wants...
US PRESIDENT Trump announced yesterday that he is sending ‘a surge of federal security forces to US cities in a crackdown on crime’. Chicago, New York and Philadelphia are being targeted in the Republican president’s offensive dubbed operation ‘Taliferro’. His comments came after Mayor of Portland, Oregon, Mayor Ted Wheeler, sided...
STAFF working on a ward for terminal coronavirus patients were denied Personal Protection Equipment (PPE) despite having to bag up 185 bodies in just 19 weeks, their union Unison has alleged. Unison have raised a formal grievance with the Trust that deals with Nottingham Queen’s Medical Centre, further alleging that...
RAN’S Parliament Speaker Mohammad-Baqer Qalibaf has called on neighbouring Iraq to ‘vigorously’ follow up on the US assassination of top anti-terror commander Lieutenant General Qassem Soleimani, censuring the crime as a stain on the record of American statesmen. ‘The United States violated Iraqi territory and impudently assassinated those who risked...
FORMER LABOUR PARTY leader Jeremy Corbyn has condemned the Labour Party’s ‘political’ decision to apologise and pay damages of over £500,000 to so-called party ‘whistleblowers’ who took part in a Panorama documentary on anti-Semitism. In the July 2019 the programme, entitled: ‘Is Labour Anti-Semitic?’ a number of former party officials...
Tens of thousands of US workers walked out of their jobs on Monday in solidarity with Black Lives Matter movement and other minority groups suffering racism. Workers and youth from a broad range of industries including fast food workers, home health aides and janitors walked off their jobs in a...
THE FINAL release by the House of Commons intelligence and security committee of the report into allegations of Russian interference in British politics is a clear indication of the abrupt shift to the right by the ruling class and the Tory party as the economic crisis deepens and British...
EX-LABOUR PARTY leader Jeremy Corbyn has hit out at Labour’s ‘political’ decision to apologise and award damages to party whistleblowers who took part in a Panorama documentary on anti-semitism. The former Labour leader waded into a major party row after it issued an ‘unreserved’ apology in the High Court and...
CHANCELLOR Rishi Sunak was accused yesterday by the Unite union of having ‘a selective memory’ when it comes to public sector pay, rewarding some but ignoring hundreds of thousands of others. Welcoming as ‘a step in the right direction’ the 3.1 per cent pay rise for 900,000 public sector workers,...
Last week, Alberta’s United Conservative Party Government of Jason Kenney introduced Bill 32, the Restoring Balance in Alberta’s Workplaces Act, which constitutes ‘an attack on workers to the benefit of corporations and the rich’. Lana Smidt, National Director of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) Prairie Region, has written...
IN HIS FOURTH of July speech US president Donald Trump attacked the ‘angry mob’ that opposes him and which he claims are out to ‘indoctrinate our children’ and ‘trample’ on freedom in America. He continued: ‘We are now in the process of defeating the radical left, the Marxists, the anarchists,...
TORY Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab’s latest attack on China – suspending the UKs extradition treaty with the country, was supported by all Parties, turning Britain into a one-party state. Raab told Parliament yesterday: ‘I have consulted with the Home Secretary, the Justice Secretary and the Attorney General, and the government...
AN ECONOMIC adviser to the campaign of US Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has warned of ‘evictions, homelessness, and food insecurity’ by the end of this month. ‘Families are going to face high rates of eviction, homelessness, food insecurity, and hunger,’ Indivar Dutta-Gupta said in an interview with NPR last...
On Friday EU leaders gathered for a three-day summit to agree on a proposed £1.6 trillion financial plan to bail out the national states from economic disaster in the face of the worst recession in history. Splits erupted immediately over differences between various blocs as to how the so-called coronavirus recovery...
By Jim Graham FOR Marxists, Irish liberation and Irish Freedom have always been a burning issue, since the period of the industrial revolution when the UK was propelled into becoming a great imperialist power in the 19th and 20th centuries. On December 10th, 1869 Marx wrote the following in a letter...
PM BORIS JOHNSON in an interview in yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph stated that the Tories were determined that there would be no further national lockdown and repeated his boast on Friday that Britain would ‘return to normal’ by November. Jean Castex the French PM has also ruled out another nationwide lockdown....
MORE than 2,000 easyJet pilots (99.9%) have voted overwhelmingly to express no confidence in the company’s Chief Operations Officer, Peter Bellew. BALPA, which organised the ballot following the airline’s poor handling of the fall-out from the coronavirus crisis and the collapse in pilot morale following Bellew’s appointment, said the result...
‘WE ARE going to give employers more discretion, and ask them to make decisions about how their staff can work safely,’ Tory PM Johnson said at a news conference at Downing Street yesterday morning. In an extraordinary move, the government has washed its hands of responsibility for whether it is...
DISCUSSION ARTICLE BY FRA HUGHES
IN BELFAST IRELAND has been partitioned North from South for nearly 100 years. 2021 will mark the centenary of the formation of the Northern Ireland State.
While Unionists and Loyalists may be celebrating another 100 years of British colonial occupation of Ireland, the Irish will be monitoring the...
A ‘RED SCARE’ is well under way, with the US and UK governments launching hourly attacks on both Russia and China in a frenzy of anti-communism. What is driving them on is the deepening crisis of the capitalist system, which has been greatly accelerated as the coronavirus pandemic deepens. Tory Foreign...
THE Palestinian Islamic resistance movement, Hamas, has warned Israeli authorities against violations at al-Aqsa Mosque in the occupied Old City of Jerusalem al-Quds, emphasising that any provocative move against the sacred site will infuriate Palestinians and subsequently ignite an armed struggle. Hamas, in a statement released on Thursday, said the...
FIGURES released yesterday by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show that the number of workers on UK company payrolls fell by 649,000 between March and June, that there are now 47,000 more young people unemployed than there were a year ago, and that the number of people claiming...
THIS WEEK the Tories were warned by leading financiers and bankers that a quarter of a million firms in the UK will be crushed under the weight of massive debt taken on to survive the coronavirus crisis. The report sent to the Treasury and the Bank of England spells out...
‘TOWER Hamlets, shame on you!’ shouted the 40-strong picket of striking council workers outside Albert Jacob House on Roman Road in east London yesterday morning. Council workers are furious after Tower Hamlets sacked the 2,700 staff who refused to sign the new contracts. The council then re-employed them on the...
THE NUJ (National Union of Journalists) has welcomed last Friday’s High Court in Belfast’s full written judgement on the quashing of arrest warrants for Trevor Birney and Barry McCaffrey as ‘a historic victory for all journalists’. A NUJ statement last Friday said: ‘Today the full written judgment has been announced...
UNITE, the largest union in Britain and Ireland, reacted to the news that Sheffield University has decided to sack over 8,000 of its employees and re-employ them on wage-cutting contracts, by blaming the University for having a ‘lousy business model.’ Responding to the decision to force staff to go down...
‘WHETHER the UK can provide an open, fair and non-discriminatory business environment for Chinese companies is a litmus test for British markets after Brexit, and it is also an indicator for China’s investment in the UK, we will be closely following that,’ Zhao Lijian, director of the Chinese Ministry...
IN THE run-up to the resumption of Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange’s US extradition trial in September, and to mark his birthday on 3rd July, Reporters Without Borders has worked with The Courage Foundation on this open letter to the UK government detailing extensive concerns about his treatment and continued...