Monthly Archives: October 2020
PM Johnson has been urged to deliver emergency funds to protect London from £20m of fire cuts. The London Fire Brigade faces £20m of cuts as part of the Mayor of London’s £431m pandemic deficit plans. The FBU warns that firefighters ‘will not forgive nor forget’ if the Prime Minister is...
A STRIKE threat has been issued at Manchester’s Metropolitan University – as students learned that in-person teaching was to resume in spite of the city’s current tier 3 status. The University then told its staff to prepare to return to campus for in-person teaching, no more than four days after...
LABOUR leader Keir Starmer suspended his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn from the Labour Party over his remarks on Thursday about anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. Corbyn’s remarks were simply a statement of fact while he was doing an interview after the publication of the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s (EHRC) report....
‘MEMBER countries at the UN Security Council are attempting to destabilise Syria and impose their own hostile agendas,’ Syria’s permanent representative to the UN, Bashar al-Jaafari has said. Speaking at a session for the Security Council through video on Wednesday al-Jaafari added: ‘Erdogan’s regime has expanded the space of its...
WITH THE second wave of the coronavirus pandemic ripping through Europe and overwhelming hospitals and health services, EU countries have been forced to implement a raft of new lockdown measures. The latest came on Wednesday night in France, when in an address to the nation, president Emmanuel Macron announced that...
LABOUR leader Keir Starmer has suspended his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn from the party over his remarks yesterday about anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. Corbyn was doing an interview after the publication of the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s (EHRC) report. Corbyn has vowed to fight the suspension. Corbyn reacted to his...
Covid-19 has ‘thrived’ among black, Asian and ethnic minority (BAME) communities because of structural race discrimination, a new Labour Party report from Baroness Doreen Lawrence said on Tuesday. Lawrence, the mother of 18-year-old Stephen Lawrence who was murdered in 1993 in a racially motivated attack, said these groups are ‘over-exposed’...
THE DRUMS are beating ever louder for an all-out war against China as world capitalism plunges into recession while the economy of the deformed workers state powers ahead from the coronavirus pandemic. The call to arms to save Western capitalism was expressed by ex-Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith in an...
‘HEATHROW’S cash mountain should be used to help low paid staff threatened by “fire and rehire”,’ Unite said yesterday. Heathrow workers are currently being balloted for strike action over attempts to carry out over 4,000 sackings and vicious pay cuts. Heathrow Airport Ltd (HAL) has issued notices to ‘fire and...
YOUNG people, particularly those from deprived backgrounds, have had their earnings and job prospects hit the hardest by the coronavirus pandemic, adding to fears for the long-term impact on their futures, research by academics and the BBC has found. Monday night’s BBC Panorama: Has Covid Stolen My Future? found that...
WITH JUST eight days to go before the US presidential election the right wing judge Amy Coney Barrett was appointed to the American Supreme Court ensuring a Republican majority. US president Donald Trump nominated Barrett and rushed through her appointment in a move that clearly demonstrates the important role that...
A CROSS Party ‘pandemic simulation’ carried out just three years before Covid-19 struck ‘played-out’ a scenario in which the health minister was asked to turn off all the ventilators in the UK, which, if carried out in reality, would mean the deaths of four thousand people. The incident happened during...
Fourteen delivery workers in South Korea have died of overwork this year because they had to handle a sharply higher volume of packages due to the coronavirus pandemic, with the latest fatality last week week, a union official said. A worker for CJ Logistics Corp collapsed while taking a short...
TENS of thousands of Chilean workers and youth flooded the main square of the capital Santiago on Sunday celebrating the result of the referendum that tore up the country’s constitution. By a massive majority of nearly 80% the Chilean people voted to abolish the old constitution that was originally passed...
THE ISRAELI military yesterday launched a large-scale exercise, involving ground forces, naval vessels and aircraft, simulating a war against Lebanon’s Hezbollah resistance movement. The multi-day manoeuvres, dubbed ‘Deadly Arrow,’ began in the occupied territories on Sunday.
Although the largest planned for this year, the war games were significantly scaled back due to...
NEARLY 500 students still remain living in a housing complex in west London while waiting for alternative accommodation despite it having been deemed a fire-trap and marked for immediate evacuation. Last Monday, residents were told they must leave the Paragon complex in Brentford after faulty cavity barriers.
Cavity barriers are there...
THE CRISIS gripping the British ruling class is being directly reflected in the splits that are tearing the Tory Party apart over how to keep capitalism from collapse under the impact of the coronavirus pandemic. These splits are now being played out in public and in the pages of the...
CORONAVIRUS infections have risen by 25% across the UK, according to the latest data from the Office for National Statistics, to more than 35,200 a day in England. On Thursday night at a minute to midnight, Greater Manchester joined Liverpool City Region, South Yorkshire and Lancashire in England’s highest tier...
KING’S College Hospital Foundation Trust (KCHFT) management has been accused by the Unite union of ‘racism, discrimination and bullying’ as staff-side joint partnership meetings are withdrawn in response, according to a report in the Health Service Journal. The staff-side committee of the major London hospital trust has stopped working with its...
THE TORY Chancellor has had to borrow another £13bn to unveil a series of desperate measures in order to attempt to keep UK capitalism afloat as more parts of the country go into Tier 3 lockdown and massive job losses. Greater Manchester’s population of 2.8 million has joined Liverpool City...
THOUSANDS deemed ineligible to receive Universal Credit have been driven to food banks to survive. The new study published yesterday by the Economic and Social Research Council-funded Benefits at a Social Distance project, concluded that out of the 290,000 people who were turned down for benefits, one in six said...
OVER 2,000 angry Nigerians demanding their president ‘Buahari must go’ demonstrated outside the Nigerian Commission in London on Wednesday evening before marching to Downing Street. The Nigerian president and his government is held responsible for the Nigerian military shooting of peaceful protesters at the Lekki tollgate in Lagos on Tuesday...
THOUSANDS of people are living in abysmal conditions in a new camp, which was built to replace Moria camp on the Greek island of Lesbos, after it was destroyed by fire last month. According to the Greek Council for Refugees and Oxfam, conditions are even worse than in Moria, with...
THE TORIES unveiled this week proposals for funding Transport for London (TfL) that will force the working and middle class to bear the huge costs of maintaining a transport system in the capital. Tory ministers have told London’s mayor Sadiq Khan that the government will take direct control of TfL...
UK GOVERNMENT borrowing hit £36.1bn in September as the UK continued heavy spending to support the economy during the coronavirus pandemic. The figure was £28.4bn more than last year, and the third highest in any month since records began in 1993, the Office for National Statistics said. The ONS said the...
SOUTH AFRICA’s CWU (Communication Workers Union) and BEMAWU (Broadcasting, Electronic, Media & Allied Workers Union) are organising for a full blown strike against the jobs bloodbath which is planned by the SABC (South African Broadcasting Corporation). The CWU said in a statement on Monday that it will be ‘mobilising and...
THE CRISIS restrictions on Greater Manchester by the Tories reveal that the collapse of British capitalism has reached such a point that the unity of the UK union itself is now under question. On Tuesday, Tory PM Boris Johnson announced that the government was walking away from the negotiations with...
TORY PM Johnson announced yesterday the government will impose the strictest measures – a Tier 3 lockdown – on Manchester, despite Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, backed by local leaders and Tory MPs, opposing the restrictions. Amongst those MPs who backed Burnham was Chair of the Tories’ 1922 Committee Graham...
AS MASS protests against police violence continued across several cities in Nigeria for the eighth straight day last Friday, the Nigerian army issued a warning to those it described as ‘subversive elements and trouble makers’ and pledged loyalty to President Mohammadu Buhari saying it is ready to support the...
WITH LESS than two weeks to go before the US presidential election on November 3rd, president Donald Trump’s former national security advisor John Bolton has added his voice to the growing view that Trump will refuse to leave office even if defeated. In a CNN interview broadcast last Sunday, Bolton...
BANK of England (BoE) boss Andrew Bailey has said the UK faces ‘an unprecedented level of economic uncertainty.’ Britain’s economy shrank by 20% in the three months to June as it battled with the coronavirus pandemic, the biggest fall of any large advanced economy.
Bailey warned that there is significant risk...
LAST Saturday over 250 pro-asylum seekers protested outside a former military barracks housing asylum seekers near Folkestone, the first refugee camp in Britian, which opened last month. Far-right protesters clashed with the police around midday on Saturday as they encircled the refugee supporters with vans.
‘The vast majority of people are...
OFFICIAL figures released last week revealed the total collapse of the Tories’ Test and Trace programme run by private companies. Analysis of these figures show that the private firms Serco and Sitel failed to contact nearly a quarter of a million people who had been in contact with those tested...
THE ISRAELI military has demolished a European Union-funded Palestinian primary school in the central part of the occupied West Bank as the Tel Aviv regime presses ahead with its land theft policies and settlement expansion on the occupied territories. The Palestinian Information Centre reported on Thursday that the bulldozers escorted...
WORKERS at the historic Rolls-Royce plant in Barnoldswick have voted 94% ‘YES’ for strike action in opposition to plans to move the site to Singapore. The company first announced the plans in August this year, which will result in the loss of 350 local jobs. The threat to the plant has...
THE BETRAYAL by the leadership of the Unite union plunged to new depths last week in the negotiations between the union and the management at Heathrow Airport Limited (HAL). HAL is relentlessly pursuing a fire and rehire policy aimed at forcing over 4,000 workers at the airport to take pay...
AUSTRALIAN Federal Police (AFP have confirmed that ABC journalist Dan Oakes will not be prosecuted over his reporting on alleged war crimes carried out by Australian special forces in Afghanistan. The Commonwealth Department of Public Prosecutions (CDPP) said there was a reasonable chance of securing a conviction against Oakes over...
POLICE spies and MI5 operatives have been given the green light to commit crimes with impunity after an extremely controversial law was passed on Thursday night, proposed by the Tories and endorsed by Labour leader Keir Starmer. 34 Labour MPs and seven opposition frontbenchers broke the party whip by voting...
CORONAVIRUS vaccinations must be managed entirely by the NHS and public bodies, and not allow the involvement of private firms and the use of unqualified staff, Unison said yesterday. In its response to a consultation by the Department of Health and Social Care on changes to medicine regulations, the union has raised...
MILLIONS of people in London, Essex, York and other areas face tougher Tier 2 Covid measures from Saturday, Tory Health Secretary Matt Hancock said yesterday. Under this ‘high’ alert level, there is a ban on households mixing indoors, including in pubs and restaurants. It comes as a final decision has yet...
FOR the first time since the conclusion of its ‘normalisation’ deals with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain, Israel is set to approve the construction of 2,166 new settler units across the occupied West Bank. The Peace Now NGO, which is an anti-settlement group that monitors settlement activity in...
THE INTERNATIONAL Monetary Fund (IMF) this week issued a grim warning of worldwide recession with global debt reaching a staggering record of £64 trillion. In its latest World Economic Outlook the IMF predicted this devastating crisis would ‘leave financial scars’ for years to come and that any recovery would be...
THE INTERNATIONAL Monetary Fund is projecting a deep recession in 2020, with global growth projected to be -4.4% in its latest update to the World Economic Outlook, IMF chief economist Gita Gopinath warned yesterday. ‘So we continue to project a deep recession in 2020 with global growth projected to be...
The head of the World Health Organisation (WHO) has warned against the idea that herd immunity might be a realistic strategy to stop the coronavirus pandemic, calling such proposals ‘unethical’ and ‘not an option’. WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a press briefing on Monday: ‘There has been some...