Monthly Archives: April 2021
FORMER Bank of England governor Mervyn King this week called for heavily indebted ‘zombie’ companies to be allowed to ‘disappear’ taking with them, although he didn’t mention it, millions of workers’ jobs. King was governor of the Bank during the world capitalist banking crash of 2008 and was responsible, along...
THE UNITED States’ Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) is to file charges against Amazon on the grounds that they illegally interfered in a recent vote to recognise the union, and to hold the giant company accountable for their actions. The RWDSU will file Objections and Unfair Labour Practice...
THE MOST recent development in the collapse of Greensill Capital has been the revelations of all the lobbying for government bail-outs by ex-Tory prime minister David Cameron. Cameron was employed by Greensill – the finance company that acted as a massive lender to companies including the UK steel company GFC...
AS THE murder trial of officer Derek Chauvin continued for the killing of George Floyd, anger erupted outside the Court House where masses of police were drafted into the area in military vehicles including a Humvee. There had been protests in the Minneapolis area overnight on Sunday and throughout yesterday...
LONDON is set to be brought to a standstill after thousands of bus workers employed by the privateer Metroline have voted overwhelmingly for strike action. The Unite members are determined to defeat the imposition of remote sign-on, under which they will be required to start and finish their shifts at...
SPECIAL Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) funding is being cut to the bone, the National Education Union (NEU) warned in a motion on the issue at their annual conference on Friday, demanding that the cuts are immediately reversed. Dr Mary Bousted, Joint General Secretary of the National Education Union, said:...
US IMPERIALISM is currently stoking up a war crisis from Ukraine to the China Seas as it seeks a way out of its economic and political catastrophe through new wars, military interventions financed by massive ever-growing military spending. Both the main US parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, are competing...
THE NEU National Education Union’s 2021 Annual Conference yesterday debated calls from members working in the independent sector for a national campaign to protect teachers’ pensions in the sector and for collective trade union representation in independent schools. Commenting on the passing of motion 33 at the National Education Union’s...
FOR NINE minutes and twenty-nine seconds police officer Derek Chauvin had his knee on George Floyd’s neck, Hennepin county courthouse in downtown Minneapolis heard during the ongoing murder trial. During those nine and a half minutes, the oxygen was squeezed out of his body, until his heart stopped and he...
THE MYANMAR military authorities have seized control of the embassy, leaving the ambassador out in the street and forcing him to sleep in his car overnight. The ousted envoy said his defence attache, Chit Win, had taken over the mission in ‘a kind of coup’, two months after the military...
TUESDAY 6th April, marked the 369th anniversary of the arrival of Dutch settlers in South Africa. The first settlers aimed at establishing trading posts and forts for the Dutch East India Company at the Cape. It marked the first annexation of South Africa. In the 15th century, other armies of...
THE MYANMAR embassy in London was taken over by representatives of the country’s military junta on Wednesday with the previous Ambassador Kyaw Zwar Minn unceremoniously kicked out and replaced by a junta loyalist. Kyaw Zwar Minn has been an irritant to the military junta for his opposition to the seizure...
‘OUR STRUGGLE is getting stronger, not weaker. There is a deep determination amongst the membership. The more mischief from management, the more they try to demonise us and the union, the stronger it makes us,’ striking bus driver and Unite member Tom Meldon said on the picket line at...
‘The State of Education: Poverty, the Pandemic and Recovery’ is the title of a devastating new NEU (National Education Union) survey of 10,000+ school and college staff which was published yesterday. Smaller class sizes should be retained as a lesson from lockdown, NEU members said.
Government must take urgent...
THIS WEEK, the boss of British Gas, Chris O’Shea, sent letters to 7,500 of its service engineers informing them that on Wednesday 14 April they face mass sackings unless they sign up to new wage-cutting contracts. These engineers are responsible for carrying out repairs for 3.6 million customers throughout the...
THREE-QUARTERS of cladding systems on new medium-rise buildings use combustible materials, data show. These include 76 schools, 25 hospitals, nursing homes, hospices and older people’s homes, and 11 university buildings. Of 66 residential projects that used rainscreen cladding systems in blocks between 11m and 18m in height in 2019 and 2020,...
‘CORONAVIRUS has exposed global inequality, and leaders have ramped up attacks on human rights,’ so concludes the Amnesty International Report 2020/21 released today, which says global inequality has been ‘brutally exposed’ by the Pandemic. The rights organisation’s new Secretary General, Agnès Callamard, has called for a ‘reset and reboot’ of...
AS THE world crisis of the capitalist system deepens, the US under President Joe Biden is preparing for a new world war. Biden is seriously stepping up the struggle against China, Russia and even states such as Germany that wish to have access to Russian gas and oil supplies. It...
DRIVERS employed by the bus privateer Go North West, marked five weeks on indefinite strike against £2,500 per annum pay cuts with a powerful 1,000-strong cavalcade, rally and march in Manchester on Saturday afternoon. Unite union branch chair and strike leader Colin Hayden told the rally ahead of the march:...
OVER 10,000 youth and workers demanding ‘Kill the Bill’ marched from Speakers Corner Hyde Park and rallied in Parliament Square, central London, on Saturday. Protests against the draconian Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill also took place in Newcastle, Birmingham, Liverpool, Brighton, Weymouth and Luton. And more than 1,000 people gathered...
A WAVE of companies across the UK and the rest of Europe will be forced into bankruptcy as new figures show that the default rate on corporate loans has doubled. According to S&P Global ratings data provided to the Daily Telegraph, businesses across the UK and Europe are up to...
THE NEW NASUWT president is to tell this weekend’s annual conference that trust bosses’ salaries are ‘verging on criminality’. The NASUWT will call for a national pay scale for all school staff to be reintroduced to curb excessive pay. Academy trust bosses in England are being paid ‘eye-watering’ salaries that are...
GO NORTH West negotiations have collapsed without agreement as Manchester bus strikes are set to continue. Protracted peace talks between management at Go North West and Unite, the union, collapsed without agreement on Thursday, meaning that the long running bus strike is set to continue for the foreseeable future. The dispute...
A METROPOLITAN Police officer is facing jail after acting as a recruiter for a banned neo-Nazi terrorist group. PC Benjamin Hannam, from Edmonton in north London, is the first police officer to be convicted of involvement in far-right terrorism. The 22-year-old was found guilty by an Old Bailey jury of...
PROTESTS took place outside hospitals yesterday morning after the call by unions to turn April 1st into a day of action for NHS staff Pay. Teams of WRP and YS organised mass leafleting of hospitals at 7am as doctors, nurses and NHS staff went in to work. The leaflet demanded: ‘Reject...
LOCAL inhabitants of Jarmaz village in Syria’s Qamishli area on Wednesday declared a national stand in rejection of both the US and the Turkish occupations. It was a condemnation of the plunder of resources in the Syrian al-Jazeera – of their violations against local people, and in support of their...
APPROXIMATELY 2 million low paid workers will be covered by the increase in the national minimum wage that came into effect yesterday. Under this increase workers aged over 23 will see an increase from £8.72 an hour to £8.91 – an increase of 19p an hour representing an increase of...
Members of the House of Commons Justice Committee are ‘shocked and appalled’ by the treatment of children at a privately run detention centre in Northamptonshire, they say in a report published on Monday. They have called on the Ministry of Justice to consider taking back direct control of the Rainsbrook Secure Training Centre unless the private company currently in charge, MTC, makes substantial improvements.
The Committee also questions why the Ministry of Justice has given privateer MTC two more...
THE DEADLY third wave of the coronavirus pandemic is ripping the EU apart over vaccinations and lockdowns. In Germany, with 9,549 new cases and 180 deaths recorded this week, German Chancellor Angela Merkel made an abrupt U-turn on the issue of lockdown. Initially, Merkel planned on a five-day national lockdown at...