Monthly Archives: November 2020
WITH around 100 rebel Tory MPs expected to vote against the new three tier lockdown system in the House of Commons tomorrow, the government is relying on Labour to get it through. Shadow cabinet minister Lisa Nandy claimed yesterday that: ‘Our support is not unconditional,’ but went on to make...
ISRAELI forces have killed over three thousand Palestinian children since the beginning of the Second Intifada also known as the Aqsa Intifada in September of 2000 while tens of thousands of others sustained injuries. The figures were released by the Palestinian Ministry of Information who pointed to the deliberate killing...
FRENCH workers and youth have risen up against the Macron-military police dictatorship and on Saturday launched massive attacks on the capitalist state’s police forces from one end of the country to the other. The last straw, after numerous racist attacks on immigrants, was the determination of the Macron regime to...
TODAY is the 200th anniversary of the birth, on 28th November, 1820, of Frederick Engels, the closest collaborator, benefactor, friend and comrade of Karl Marx. Engels was born in November 1820 in the Rhineland town of Barmen.
This town was known with good reason as the ‘German Manchester’, a heavily industrialised,...
IRAN’S judiciary says it has formed a committee to chase and track down those accused of complicity in the US assassination of Iranian anti-terror commander, Lieutenant General Qassem Soleimani. Seyyed Ashrafi, a deputy prosecutor and the special investigator dealing with the case of General Soleimani’s assassination, said the committee has...
THE TORIES have launched the most vicious attack on the working class since they came to power in 2010. After ten years of austerity, impoverishing a generation of older workers, burdening students with a lifetime of debt, and throwing an entire generation of youth onto the unemployment scrap heap,...
‘I WANT to see this community testing which has been successful in Liverpool rolled out right across the tier three areas, as much as is possible, and I advise all councils to engage,’ Tory Secretary of State Matt Hancock told Parliament yesterday, announcing which areas of England the toughest...
THE GOVERNMENT’S announcement of a national lockdown on 31st October, after trying to stave off this ‘nuclear’ option for two months with tiered restrictions, was not a minute too soon. Rather it was two months or more too late, given the lack of a proper test, trace and quarantine...
IF TORY Chancellor Rishi Sunak harboured any hope that Wednesday’s spending review would reassure anyone that British capitalism could be rescued from complete ruin then he was deluding himself. Even the Tory Party’s most loyal supporters in the press are now openly acknowledging that the UK is bankrupt, drowning in...
NEARLY 800 nurses at a Bucks County hospital in Pennsylvania went on strike last Tuesday and Wednesday over dangerously low staffing levels that prevent them from providing high-quality care to patients. The nurses work at St. Mary Medical Centre in Langhorne, Bucks County, one of the most profitable hospitals in...
TORY chancellor Rishi Sunak, at a cabinet briefing before unveiling his latest spending review in Parliament yesterday, warned that the forecast for the UK economy made for ‘sobering reading’. This was a massive understatement – the forecast from the government’s tax and spending watchdog, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR),...
FRENCH riot police have been condemned over violently dispersing protesters in Paris demonstrating against a new security bill (the PPL Securite Globale) which bans the ‘making or sharing’ of footage of police officers. On the StopLoiSecuriteGlobale twitter feed, Peter Ramsay posted a video showing riot police laying into Parisians, with...
PALESTINIAN resistance movement Hamas has denounced Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s secret flight to Saudi Arabia, where he reportedly met with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, as an ‘insult’ to the Palestinian cause. Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri described the Israeli premier’s...
ISRAELI forces cracked down on an anti-annexation protest yesterday which was heading towards Khirbet Humsa al-Fawqa village, near Tubas in the northern Jordan Valley, injuring dozens. A large Israeli military force violently dispersed the rally whih was organised against the Israeli occupation authorities’ plan to annex the site of the demolished...
‘LATER this week we will announce which areas will fall into which tiers,’ Tory PM Johnson told Parliament yesterday, speaking from Number 10, where he is still self-isolating, and setting out a return to the Three-Tiers system after December 2nd – but with harsher restrictions. Outlining the government’s ‘Covid winter...
JULIAN Assange will most likely take his own life if he is convicted, an online meeting for NUJ members has heard. Jen Robinson, lawyer to the Wikileaks founder for a decade, told members that her client ‘had hardly been able to hold a conversation when he was in solitary confinement...
A MASSIVE mountain of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) is currently sitting on Felixstowe docks while frontline healthcare workers are still being forced to work in dangerous conditions without any adequate protection. According to the Telegraph newspaper nearly 10,000 shipping containers full of surgical masks, aprons and gloves are stuck at...
HANAN ASHRAWI, member of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO)’s Executive Committee, has condemned the US top diplomat’s visit to an Israeli colonial settlement in the West Bank as an endorsement of land theft and plunder. ‘The visit of US Secretary of State Pompeo to the occupied West Bank is a...
THE UK working class is heading into the greatest ever winter struggle in its history, much greater than any of the ‘winters of discontent’ of the past that brought the British working class and ruling class into revolutionary confrontations. Chancellor Sunak is to announce an extra £3bn package for the...
TORY Prime Minister Johnson is expected to require Labour votes to get his new tougher tier system passed by the House of Commons next week. The cabinet met over Zoom yesterday and Johnson is to make a statement in the House of Commons this afternoon, announcing his plan for post-lockdown...
PUBLIC SECTOR employees, many of whom are essential Covid-19 workers, should not be subject to a continuing pay freeze from a government that has not learnt the lessons of austerity, Unite, the union, said yesterday. Unite was responding to the right-wing Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) which said a freeze...
THE PALESTINIAN-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement has criticised and firmly rejected US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s labelling of its movement as ‘anti-Semitic’. Its statement stressed: ‘It’s quite ironic that the Trump Administration, prompted by Israel’s apartheid regime, continues to enable and normalise white supremacy and anti-semitism in...
THE TORIES have exceeded all previous borrowing records, taking the British bosses’ national debt to its highest level ever since records began, reaching £2.3tn. Chancellor Rishi Sunak has already made it crystal clear that the government’s priority is to ‘balance the books’. In other words, they intend to claw back...
TWENTY seven Labour MPs have signed a statement from the Socialist Campaign Group describing Labour leader Keir Starmer’s decision not to readmit Jeremy Corbyn to the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) as ‘wrong and damaging’ and saying the decision should be swiftly reversed. Their statement reads: ‘Wednesday’s decision to reinstate Jeremy...
A REPORT on Wednesday by the Institute of International Finance (IIF) warned that the world is drowning under an unprecedented and increasing amount of debt and faces an ‘attack of the debt tsunami’. Global debt increased by $15 trillion in the first nine months this year and is expected to...
BECAUSE the government waited so long before imposing a national lockdown on 31 October, large numbers of people will continue to die of coronavirus up into December. Delay in lockdown in March, resulted in an estimated 20,000 lives lost in the first wave. Now the government has delayed again in...
THOUSANDS of youth and workers participated throughout Greece in the annual Athens Polytechnic Uprising marches and mobilisations last Tuesday, defying a state of siege imposed by the right-wing government banning all public gatherings of more than three persons on the pretext of the Covid-19 pandemic. In response, the Greek government...
FORMER Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn will not have the party’s whip restored, his successor as Labour Party leader, Sir Keir Starmer has announced. The shock decision means that Corbyn will not officially be a Labour MP. In a statement on Wednesday, Starmer said: ‘I’m the leader of the Labour Party, but...
THE SAFETY of maternity services is under serious threat, according to a new survey released by the Royal College of Midwives (RCM) on Tuesday. The survey found that eight out of 10 midwives (83%) do not believe their NHS Trust or Board has enough staff to operate a safe service. Services...
BY A UNANIMOUS vote on Tuesday the disciplinary panel of the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee overturned the suspension of former leader Jeremy Corbyn from membership. This decision by Labour’s ruling body followed the suspension of Corbyn by the right-wing leadership of Keir Starmer on trumped up charges of anti-Semitism. In...
A SIX-MONTH campaign led by an NHS doctor to have the full report into a pandemic preparation exercise published has successfully forced the Health Secretary to disclose Public Health England’s Cygnus report. The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) has finally posted on the government website the Public Health...
OVER 1,400 students at the University of Bristol are participating in an ongoing rent strike to protest against the University’s Covid-19 response. This constitutes the largest university rent strike in decades by withholding over £2 million. Finlay Stevenson, from Bristol Cut the Rent, said: ‘After some preliminary meetings with university...
ISRAEL is in a race against time to create a fait accompli in Palestine before US President Donald Trump leaves office, Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh has warned. He added: ‘There appears to be an escalating and intensive assault plan for the next 10 weeks in a race against time...
A US FEDERAL judge has rejected the limitations imposed by the Trump administration on a programme protecting hundreds of thousands of immigrants – often called ‘Dreamers’ – who entered the United States illegally as children. Judge Nicholas Garaufis in New York ruled last Saturday that President Donald Trump’s acting Homeland...
VER 1,000 GPs have written to Tory Health Secretary Matt Hancock demanding that the government produces a ‘full plan’ for the roll out of the coronavirus vaccine. GPs are furious over government plans to create 1,500 vaccination centres, most of which will be based at GP surgeries, giving them the...
WORKERS at Heathrow Airport Ltd (HAL) are launching three 24-hour strikes over plans to fire and rehire its 4,000 workers on vastly reduced pay – action which will grind the entire airport to a halt. The strike action by members of the union Unite, will involve firefighters, engineers, campus security,...
SENIOR Tories sought to deny that the Tory government is breaking apart yesterday, with former Brexit Secretary David Davis congratulating PM Boris Johnson for taking ‘decisive action’ in sacking his senior adviser Dominic Cummings and press secretary Lee Cain. Davis said Cummings had a ‘very confrontational-style’ which had turned people...
SYRIAN President Bashar al-Assad has blamed the United States for hampering the return of refugees to Syria. Assad was delivering a speech delivered via video to the opening of the two-day International Conference on the Return of Refugees in Damascus last week.
He said: ‘Today we continue working persistently for the...
THE Unite and GMB trade unions have issued calls for the Johnson Tory government to take action to save 8,000 Tata workers jobs in the UK. They have handed over their function as a trade union to a Tory government! The 8,000 jobs are now directly under threat after Tata...
AN INVESTIGATION released last week into the deaths in July 2019 of two railworkers at Magram, a suburb of Port Talbot in Wales, has found there was ‘a failure to protect staff there over many years’. Gareth Delbridge, 64, and Michael Lewis, 58, were hit by a Swansea to Paddington...
SINCE September, homeless people, including homeless asylum seekers and refugees, have been unceremoniously dumped back onto the streets of the UK. A study published in The Lancet found that, during the first lockdown, 266 deaths and 1,164 hospital admissions had been averted under the ‘everyone in’ scheme. This was a scheme...
CROYDON Council has gone bankrupt after racking up debts of £1.5bn. The council issued a rare Section 114 notice, effectively declaring itself bankrupt, on Wednesday afternoon. It comes after auditors heavily criticised the south London council for ignoring more than three years of internal warnings over its finances. It is the first...
AS COVID-19 continues to fuel increased hardship among the two million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, thousands of vulnerable and orphaned refugee children living in the enclave are receiving invaluable assistance from Islamic Relief USA (IRUSA) through a generous grant to United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for...
NEARLY one year ago the Tories under Boris Johnson won a resounding victory in the general election winning a massive 80-seat majority in the Commons. Johnson and the Tories emerged triumphant from the general election last December, but today that triumphant Johnson government is nothing more than a political wreckage...