Monthly Archives: May 2021
ON WEDNESDAY, Tory prime minister Boris Johnson announced that there would be ‘a full and independent inquiry’ into the government handling of the coronavirus pandemic. He informed MPs that the Tories are ‘fully committed to learning the lessons at every stage’ of the pandemic and that the inquiry would place...
LONDON bus operator Metroline’s decision not to permanently drop its controversial ‘remote sign-on’ policy will lead to five days of strike action that will cause serious disruption to services in the north and west of the capital. Unite the union has announced 48 hours of strike action by more than...
THREE days of Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip left 59 Palestinians dead by noon yesterday local time, including 14 children and three women, while 296 were wounded, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in an update on the casualties. Israel has waged dozens of airstrikes since Monday on...
The military regime in Myanmar has issued 360 arrest warrants for health workers and charged them under Section 505 of the Penal Code, sentencing some to three years prison, Public Services International (PSI) reported on Tuesday. Health workers have been arrested whilst treating injured patients, others taken from their homes...
IT SPEAKS volumes for the disastrous state of British capitalism that news that the UK economy has collapsed by a further 1.5% in the first three months of 2021 is greeted by bourgeois commentators and politicians as a sign of its strength not terminal weakness. As the Guardian newspaper’s economic...
RESPONDING to yesterday’s Queen’s Speech, the Unite union’s general secretary Len McCluskey said: ‘This Queen’s Speech reveals the nasty, repressive side of this government. ‘The moves on voter ID that could see millions of young and poor people lose their vote, alongside the plan to curtail the right to protest...
The RCN’s Nursing Workforce Standards have been created to explicitly set out what must happen within workplaces to ensure the delivery of safe and effective patient care. The 14 standards – the first of their kind – have been designed for use by those who fund, plan, commission, design, review...
HUMAN Rights Watch (HRW) said in a report on April 27: ‘The oppression of Palestinians has reached a threshold and a permanence that meets the definitions of the crimes of apartheid and persecution.’ It has already forwarded these findings to the International Criminal Court (ICC) stating: ‘Denying millions of Palestinians...
RIGHT-wing Zionists who planned a march through Jerusalem yesterday were forced to call it off. They planned to mark the beginning of the occupation of Jerusalem in the 1967 war. However, Israel’s PM Netanyahu said that the 30,000-strong right-wing march could not go through the Arab quarter of the City,...
A HIGH-RANKING member of the Palestinian Islamic resistance movement, Hamas, has called on the ‘Muslim world to take up a firm stance in support of the residents of occupied Jerusalem al-Quds, and adopt proper measures to stop the acts of aggression being perpetrated by Israeli forces in the holy...
ISRAELI forces stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound yesterday morning, firing rubber-coated bullets, tear gas and sound bombs at Palestinian worshippers, wounding hundreds in a concerted drive to force Palestinians out of the compound and out of Jerusalem completely. This latest round of violence by the Israeli state came just hours...
TORY Prime Minister Boris Johnson has invited the SNP’s Nicola Sturgeon and the Welsh First Minister Mark Drakeford, to a ‘Team UK’ summit. Johnson congratulated Sturgeon for the SNP’s fourth Scottish Parliament election win in a row and Drakeford for Labour’s win in the Welsh Parliament and invited them to...
BY FRA HUGHES ‘THEY will not criminalise us, rob us of our true identity, steal our individualism, depoliticise us, churn us out as systemised, institutionalised, decent law-abiding robots. Never will they label our liberation struggle as criminal,’ Bobby Sands. The 1980 Hunger Strike led by Brendan Hughes comprised of seven Republican...
THE general secretary of the Unite union Len McCluskey has responded to Labour’s massive council election defeats and its disastrous loss in the Hartlepool by-election by telling Sir Keir Starmer to ‘reach out to the left’, signalling that the trade union leaders are prepared to continue propping him up...
STARMER’S LABOUR Party has been hit for six in the Hartlepool by-election, with a Tory MP elected for the first time in the current constituency’s history. Tory candidate Jill Mortimer – who defeated Labour rival Paul Williams by nearly 7,000 votes – hailed the result as a ‘truly historic’ moment. It...
THE HARTLEPOOL by-election result and the council by-election results mean that Starmer and Labour’s right wing must be dumped by the trade unions at once. Starmer has spent the best part of a year agreeing with PM Johnson, offering time and time again to work with the Tories during the...
THE HIGH COURT ruled yesterday that the Home Office unlawfully prevented the family of Trinidadian national Lynda Mahabir, who came to the UK aged two months in 1969, from joining her in UK. Her father took her back to Trinidad eight years later, in 1977. The court heard that the Home...
The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) President Zingiswa Losi delivered a Workers Day Speech on May 1st. ‘My fellow South Africans, President Cyril Ramaphosa, General Secretary of the SACP, comrade Blade Nzimande, leadership of COSATU and our unions, and most importantly the workers of our beloved land, we...
BACK in 2014 the police announced that they were ‘relaxing’ their rules on recruitment to allow convicted criminals to join. In fact, this just legitimised a widespread practice. The Metropolitan police had for a long time before been recruiting convicted criminals into its ranks and this was extended to all forces...
WORKERS who carry out vital services for Norwich City Council have overwhelmingly voted for industrial action. In the Unite ballot 83% of the workers backed industrial action on a 90 per cent turnout and Unison members voted 81 per cent in favour of strike action on a turnout of 84...
Unions across the world are outraged to learn that Justin Trudeau’s Liberal minority government teamed up with Canada’s Conservative opposition in the early hours of last Thursday morning to progress legislation to rip away Montréal dockworkers’ right to strike. ‘Justin Trudeau’s government has launched an assault on the human rights...
THIS WEEK Unison, the largest public sector union in the country, issued a statement declaring that it ‘stands ready’ to work with the Tory government. The leadership of Unison declared its desire to participate, along with the TUC, with the Tories, employers and Health and Social Care officials in a...
THE UNIVERSITY and College Union (UCU) yesterday announced a global boycott of the University of Leicester as the union hit the institution with the ultimate sanction of being ‘greylisted’. The announcement comes as Leicester staff also begin a marking and assessment boycott.
The greylisting sanction is part of a long running...
UNICEF has condemned the Boris Johnson government’s decision to cut aid to the United Nations body warning it will have ‘serious consequences for children’. It said in a statement last Friday: ‘The UK government has informed us today that it intends to reduce UNICEF’s core funding by approximately 60 per...
PALESTINIAN Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh has called on United Nations bodies, particularly the Children’s Fund (UNICEF), to follow up on the recent Human Rights Watch (HRW) report which says Israel is imposing apartheid and persecution in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. During a meeting with Ted Chaiban,...
STAFF at the DVLA office in Swansea begin their four-day strike today after fears of a fresh Covid-19 outbreak as more than 2,000 people go into the Swansea office every day. Workers at the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) in the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union were on...
SCORES of South African firefighters facing possible dismissal and or disciplinary action marched on the City of Cape Town offices on Saturday in support of demands for better working conditions. The march, which also commemorated International Workers’ Day, brought traffic to a halt on some of the city’s busiest streets...
INDIA’S prime minister Narendra Modi and his right-wing BJP party suffered a massive political defeat at the hands of voters in West Bengal on Sunday. Modi confidently expected to make large gains in elections in this state. Instead, the BJP was trounced by the opposition All India Trinamool Congress despite Modi...
THE Fatah Movement yesterday called upon the United Nations and the UN Security Council to fulfil their legal responsibilities and act against Israel’s imminent plan to displace five hundred Palestinians from their homes, lands and properties in the neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah in occupied Jerusalem. Osama Al-Qawasmi, Member of the...
‘IT IS our international duty to organise the overthrow of the capitalist system here in Britain,’ WRP General Secretary Frank Sweeney told the 100-strong Workers Revolutionary Party and Young Socialists May Day Rally in Kensington Memorial Park, west London on Saturday afternoon. Sweeney said: ‘This May Day we especially send...
THE major French trade union the CGT has protested at the massive attack on peaceful demonstrators by riot police and and vigilantes and has called on the whole working class to mobilise. It states that on Saturday May 1st when 25,000 demonstrators began to leave the Place de la Nation,...
THE UNITE leadership yesterday failed to get a ‘fire and rehire’ deal accepted by RATP bus workers. The vote at seven West London bus garages showed that 652 workers voted to reject and the same number voted to accept, with three spoiled papers – meaning that the proposal agreed between...
THE NEWS LINE Editorial Board sends its May Day greetings to the working class and the poor of the world who are confronting a bankrupt capitalist system gripped by the greatest economic crisis in its history. May Day 2021 is historic – it is taking place under conditions where the...
THE CURRENT government-proposed cladding loan scheme must be abolished – and it should be replaced with a ‘comprehensive’ fund, a cross-party group of MPs has insisted. And meanwhile the Building Safety Fund ‘should now be extended,’ the same group of MPs has stressed. At the same time the report by the...