Monthly Archives: January 2021

THE TUC yesterday warned that millions of workers lack basic protections if they lose their jobs in the coming months. New analysis shows that 7.5 million employees (1 in 4) began this year with no protection from unfair dismissal. Under current law workers must be employed for two years to qualify...

ACTIVISTS threw fake blood at the gates of Napier Barracks last Thursday – in protest against the conditions in which hundreds of asylum seekers are being forced to live. An anonymous group of human rights activists has dressed in white boiler suits and masks and erected posters addressed to Home...

A VACCINE war broke out between the European Union and the UK last week over the supply of the AstraZeneca vaccine against the coronavirus. The EU had a deal with AstraZeneca which was for 300 million doses, with an option for 100 million more. The first 100 million doses were...

ONE in eight NHS trusts in England did not have a single spare intensive care bed last week, NHS England figures published yesterday revealed. 18 out of 140 major trusts had 100 per cent occupancy in their ICUs on every day in the week ending January 24th, up slightly on...

‘EMOTIONALLY, we are not coping. Seeing death at this rate every day is not normal,’ was the view of hospital nurse Mosima Doreen Mabeba – working in the intensive care unit (ICU) of a provincial hospital in Limpopo. She is one of the many health professionals – both in South...

IN THE LATEST update of its Global Financial Stability Report, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is warning that ‘complacent’ financial markets are facing a sudden collapse if central banks and governments start to cut back on handing out trillions of dollars of free money to the banks and speculators. IMF...

‘WE MUST take additional steps to strengthen our borders,’ said Tory PM Johnson in Parliament yesterday, outlining the new Hotel Quarantine system. The system means that British Nationals and people from abroad will be served with a hotel bill at the end of the ten days of forced quarantine that...

  From Our India Correspondent ON TUESDAY 26th January, Indian Republic Day, a huge parade took place of at least 37 farm unions. In this rally, they covered around 100 kilometres of the national capital. The rally started from Ghazipur in Uttar Pradesh region, and reached Delhi, where they clashed with the...

ON TUESDAY, the UK officially recorded 100,000 deaths from Covid-19 with half of these deaths being recorded since November 2020. Even this terrible number of deaths is set to be surpassed in the coming weeks and months with Chris Witty, chief medical officer for England, telling the press: ‘Unfortunately, we...

TENS of thousands of farmers drove in a convoy of tractors yesterday into the Indian capital during national Republic Day celebrations as part of protests that threaten to bring down the government. The capital’s roads were swarmed by rows upon rows of tractors bearing the flags of India and agricultural...

Iran’s senior military commander says the country’s recent back-to-back military drills have made the United States give up its threats of military action against the Islamic Republic. The remarks came less than a week after Iran’s Army and the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) wrapped up a series of manoeuvers which saw...

1.72 MILLION are now jobless! The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said yesterday it is the highest level in five years. Workers aged between 25 to 34 are being sacked by the thousands. In the three months to November, they had a redundancy rate of 16.2 per 1,000, a fivefold...

THE TRADES Union Congress (TUC) warned yesterday that ‘fire and rehire’ tactics have become widespread during the pandemic, with new polling finding that nearly one-in-ten workers have been told to reapply for their jobs on worse terms amid the Covid crisis. Commenting on the release of the fresh research, Trades...

THE US has dispatched an aircraft carrier group to the South China Sea, in a move that is set to escalate tensions after China authorised its coastguard to open fire on any foreign vessel deemed to pose a threat to its sovereignty. The US military announced on Sunday that the...

YESTERDAY the Office for National Statistics (ONS) published its report breaking down the number of deaths from Covid-19 in 2020 by occupation. The key conclusion from this report is that men in the working age population in low-skilled jobs – in the care sector or other service jobs – are...

THE GAP between the first and second dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech coronavirus vaccine must be reduced to three or four weeks to ensure it is effective, senior doctors insisted yesterday, challenging the Tory policy of delaying the second dose for at least 12 weeks. Health Secretary Hancock was left floundering...

THE TORIES ‘indecision’ means nursing staff are facing a postcode lottery in Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), leaving some more protected than others, the Royal College of Nurses (RCN) has warned. The RCN points out: Updated official guidance will deepen current variation between hospitals. Some hospitals offering staff higher level respiratory...

WORKERS throughout the world have experienced, through massive job losses and huge wage cuts, just how the world crisis of the capitalist system is deepening on a daily basis. The New Year’s Day Manifesto of the News Line correctly explained that: ‘This world capitalist crisis is now driving forward the...

RESPONDING to the annual State of Fire report from Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services, Matt Wrack, FBU general secretary, said: ‘The Inspectorate is doing the bidding of the government and fire chiefs to attack the firefighters.’ He added: ‘This report is a political and biased...

IT IS now estimated that 39% of teachers and school leaders – as well as 51% of teaching assistants and other staff – are working on-site in open settings in the current lockdown. And statistics from the Department of Education (DfE) have revealed that the rate of Covid-19 infection among...

US PRESIDENT Joe Biden will keep the US embassy in Israel in Jerusalem, his nominee for Secretary of State Antony Blinken affirmed at his Senate confirmation hearing. ‘Do you agree that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel and do you commit that the United States will keep our embassy in...

‘THERE is still a small minority who refuse to do the right thing and to them my message is clear: if you don’t follow these rules the police will enforce them,’ Tory Home Secretary Priti Patel said yesterday. She was speaking at the Downing Street press conference at 5pm, flanked...

IRAN’S President Hassan Rouhani says that outgoing US president, Donald Trump, registered state terrorism on America’s official record by openly accepting responsibility for the assassination of top Iranian anti-terror commander Lieutenant General Soleimani in a third country. ‘We had never before seen a US president explicitly announcing that he had assassinated a senior military...

THE INAUGURATION of Joe Biden as president of the United States on Wednesday was enthusiastically greeted by prime minister Boris Johnson saying: ‘When you look at the issues which unite me and Joe Biden, the UK and the US right now, there is a fantastic joint common agenda.’ What Johnson...

WORKERS at Sanofi, which is France’s largest pharmaceutical company, went on strike on Tuesday following the announcement of 1,000 sackings as part of a three-year cost-cutting plan. The action came ahead of mass strike action throughout France on three key days this month, in health today, January 21, in national...

THE HOUSE of Lords today will be debating the Overseas Operations Bill which gives the British military a licence to kill and torture throughout the world free from any threat of prosecution. The Bill creates a legal and binding ‘presumption against prosecution’ for any current or former UK military personnel...

MANY junior doctors feel out of their depth with the end-of-life decisions faced during Covid-19 pandemic In normal times, end-of-life care discussions are most commonly led by senior doctors. However, new research from a busy London hospital shows that the high numbers of deaths taking place in hospitals during the...

BRITISH Airways’ (BA) freight services at Heathrow airport are set for nine days of fresh strike action which will begin on Friday 22 January after talks between Unite and BA’s management collapsed. Unite said yesterday that this was due to the determination of the company ‘to opportunistically strip its hardworking and loyal...

THE SHOCKING depth and breadth of the scandalous cruelty and murderous treatment of unmarried mothers and their children by the Catholic Church and the Irish State throughout most of the 20th century is at last being exposed following the belated publication of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and...

THE TORY government was delivered a massive blow on Monday evening when it was defeated by 278 votes to 0 when MPs voted for a Labour motion in the House of Commons to extend the Universal Credit top-up beyond March 31. The PM withdrew his amendment to the resolution when...

‘REDUCING Universal Credit and Working Tax Credit would be fundamentally the wrong decision. It would be a profound mistake and put millions of families into poverty,’ Jonathan Reynolds, Labour’s Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary, said yesterday. Reynolds was moving a motion in yesterday’s opposition debate to ramp up the pressure...

FAR-RIGHT extremists are reportedly furious with Donald Trump, calling him a ‘traitor’ and a ‘coward’, after the outgoing president pleaded for calm following his impeachment for inciting the violent storming of the US Capitol last week. Faced with an unprecedented backlash after he goaded his supporters to march on Congress,...

LAST WEEK the Bank of England (BoE) finally confessed that it doesn’t understand its own quantitative easing programme (QE) – the central, in fact the only, policy adopted by the Bank to keep British capitalism from total collapse. This startling admission was forced on the BoE by an Independent Evaluation...

‘THE FACTS are very clear and I’m not going to sugar-coat them, hospitals are under extreme pressure and staff are under extreme pressure,’ NHS Chief Executive Sir Simon Stevens told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show yesterday. He went on: ‘Staggeringly, every 30 seconds across England another patient is being admitted...

STUDENT nurses who are currently doing their placements are facing serious risks. Their lives are at risk as many are treating coronavirus patients and to make matters worse they are both unpaid and without life insurance. Student nurse Lizzy, who is on placement at the moment has spoke up about...

EVERYBODY knows that the Tory government was completely unprepared for the Covid-19 crisis that erupted in the UK in December 2020. The Operation Cygnus exercise debacle in October 2016 proved that the government was absolutely unready to deal with the epidemic. Huge mistakes were made when the epidemic struck, from transferring...

‘IT would be fatal if this sense of progress over vaccines was now to breed any kind complacency,’ Tory PM Boris Johnson said yesterday at the 5pm Downing Street press conference. As he was speaking, the capitalist press reported that ‘Hundreds of soldiers are to be sent into major London...

DEPUTY governor of the Bank of England Ben Broadbent said this week that ‘resilient’ household spending has been ‘funded by tomorrow’s taxpayers’ – in a thinly-veiled comment on the impact of the UK Tory government’s furlough scheme is having on UK public finances. Broadbent was clearly saying that the mammoth...

THE NATIONAL Audit Office (NAO) has produced a new report which says that the true number of people sleeping on the streets ‘far exceeds’ Tory ‘estimates’. In Autumn 2019, the government claimed that there were 4,266 people sleeping rough on any given night. At the time, homeless charity Shelter said...

DESPITE the Tories’ assurances that no one will be evicted during the pandemic, any renters who have built up arrears before the pandemic face being thrown onto the street, despite the lockdown, new legislation sneaked in now allows. Legislation has been quietly tweaked to mean that renters can now be...

A HUMANITARIAN organisation has made further allegations against French police, accusing them of abusing migrants within the port city of Calais. The Human Rights Observers (HRO) group alleges that French police have been increasingly engaging in aggressive evictions, with the intention of ruining the hope and the spirits of migrants...

DONALD Trump became the first president of the United States to be impeached twice when the House of Representatives voted on Wednesday to charge him with inciting violent insurrection against the US government. With the Democratic Party House leader, Nancy Pelosi, denouncing Trump as a ‘clear and present danger to...

THE DEVASTATING ramifications for BT employees of the brutal new management approach sweeping across BT is not just illustrated by the scores of compulsory redundancies that have already reached their sad conclusions. Dozens more are currently underway. An even starker illustration of the depths to which BT has plumbed is...

By Fra Hughes in West Belfast LAST Thursday, January 7, 2020, Fiona Donohoe led a cavalcade of hundreds of cars with perhaps thousands of people on a marathon drive across Belfast, from Blacks Road Park and Ride, to the gates of Stormont, home to the Northern Ireland regionally devolved government. This...

NINE thousand children died in Irish ‘mother and baby’ homes run by the Catholic Church throughout the 20th century, a long awaited report has revealed. These homes were established by the state as institutions run jointly with the Catholic Church and staffed mainly by nuns for unmarried mothers and their...