Monthly Archives: October 2021
NEW RESEARCH by ActionAid, Public Services International, and Education International warns that the International Monetary Fund’s demands to cut public sector employee costs undermine progress on health and education. The International Monetary Fund’s advice to cut government spending in the global south has wiped nearly $10 billion from public sector...
NEW RESEARCH by ActionAid, Public Services International, and Education International warns that the International Monetary Fund’s demands to cut public sector employee costs undermine progress on health and education. The International Monetary Fund’s advice to cut government spending in the global south has wiped nearly $10 billion from public sector...
THE COVID report by two parliamentary select committees published this week has been correctly universally greeted as a damning indictment of the Tory government’s response to the pandemic. In fact, this report by 22 MPs from all the main parties is nothing more than an attempt to whitewash the Tories...
THE TORY government’s failure to do more to stop Covid spreading early on in the pandemic was one of the ‘worst public health failures’ in UK history, a report by MPs says. The report, ‘Coronavirus: lessons learned to date’, examined the initial UK response to the Covid pandemic by the The House...
A 24-HOUR general strike paralysed Italian towns and cities on Monday, while 127 Alitalia flights were cancelled and public transport ground to a halt. The city centres of Milan and Rome were jammed with traffic, while many roads and central squares in were closed because of demonstrations, including Piazza della...
PRIME Minister Boris Johnson is expected to mount a billion pound rescue operation to postpone energy-intensive British basic industries from going under, as gas prices continue to rocket upwards. On Sunday, Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng told the BBC he had asked the Treasury to support firms that were crashing due...
THE FIRST day of a five-day strike yesterday marked an escalation in the college lecturers’ struggle with eleven colleges out on strike. At the College of Haringey, Enfield and North East London (CONEL) there was a powerful and determined picket of around 30 striking lecturers, supporters and students.
Speaking at a...
SYRIA’S air defences have thwarted an Israeli missile attack on a military airbase in the country’s central province of Homs, shooting most of the missiles down. The Syrian official news agency SANA reported that Israel attacked the T-4 airbase, which is in the desert, on Friday evening.
‘At around 9.33pm this...
THE CONVICTION and life sentence of Metropolitan police officer Wayne Couzens for the murder of Sarah Everard was most certainly not the case of one ‘bad apple’ as Met Commissioner Cressida Dick claimed when he was first convicted. It was revealed this weekend that, in the week Couzens was sentenced,...
Treasury officials accused Business Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng of ‘making things up’ when he appeared on TV yesterday morning. With PM Johnson on holiday in Marbella, a public row has blown up at the heart of the Tory government.
Kwarteng told the Trevor Phillips on Sunday programme...
HEZBOLLAH Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has thanked Iran for helping Lebanon weather its economic crisis, saying the Islamic Republic has proven to be a ‘sincere ally’ in spite of the difficult circumstances it is facing. ‘Iran has proven that it is a sincere ally and a loyal friend that...
MICHAEL Saunders, a member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC), is warning that households, and million of workers must brace themselves for significant interest rate rises as the Bank of England moves to head off soaring inflation with a multi-million job-destroying deflationary drive. He conceded that a...
CHRONIC staff shortages, concerns about patient safety and plunging morale at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust are the key findings of a staff survey carried out by the union Unite. Unite, which has 100,000 members in the health service, warned that the ‘shocking’ findings at the London trust...
A BAHRAINI delegation has joined Israeli settlers in the storming of the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem! This comes after Bahrain, along with UAE, Sudan and others, made ‘normalisation’ agreements with Israel.
Israeli settlers, under the protection of the regime’s armed forces, have once again broken into the al-Aqsa Mosque compound in...
A MAJOR global gas crisis has brought the crisis of the EU and the NATO military alliance to a head. The wholesale cost of gas has gone up by an extraordinary 600% across the EU. France’s gas prices soared 48% in September. Household electricity bills in Italy rose by 29.8%...
‘TRADE unions must call a general strike to kick out this Tory government,’ Chris Anglin, College of Haringey, Enfield and North East London (CONEL) UCU chair said yesterday morning, addressing a powerful 50-strong UCU picket assembled outside the format of the college. Supporters brought banners from Unite Community branch, Haringey...
SOUTH African workers – members of the Numsa trade union in the steel and engineering sectors have embarked on an indefinite strike – recalling the long-standing pay dispute that first began in 2021. The strike could also, like the earlier one that took place in 2014, last for weeks and...
PM JOHNSON’S Tory conference speech was completely empty bombast that sought to cover over the economic catastrophe that is developing throughout the capitalist system with a false bravado. Much of it was at the expense of Labour Party leader Starmer, who is acting as Johnson’s stooge, and is more than...
‘IT WAS CAPITALISM that ensured we had vaccines in less than a year,’ Tory PM Johnson boasted in his closing speech at the Tory Party conference in Manchester yesterday, completely ignoring the role the NHS played and Oxford university in the development, trials and roll-out of the vaccine. Johnson told...
IRANIAN lawmakers have issued a statement in support of military exercises in north western Iran to warn against the Israeli regime’s presence on Azerbaijan’s soil, saying movements at Iran’s borders with its neighbours is a ‘red line’ for the Islamic Republic. ‘Any geopolitical developments in the region and movements at the...
PM BORIS Johnson delivered a speech to the Tory faithful yesterday that was immediately dismissed by Matthew Lesh, head of the research at the right-wing Adam Smith Institute, as ‘bombastic but vacuous and economically illiterate’. It certainly didn’t satisfy the immediate demands of the bosses and bankers for tax cuts...
‘WE HAVE delivered more powers to the police, including stop and search,’ Tory Home Secretary Priti Patel told the Tory conference in Manchester yesterday. This is despite the murder of Sarah Everard by a Met Police officer! She continued: ‘We are nearly half way through to recruiting nearly 20,000 additional police...
SAN ANTONIO Symphony Orchestra musicians have called a strike after management imposed a binding new contract on them from September 13. The Texan San Antonio Symphony musicians work on three-year contracts, and this is the third year of the current contract.
The musicians agreed late last winter to a renegotiated third...
THE LAW Courts are to get new police state powers to be used against striking trade unionists and protesting workers. The powers will stop the blocking of Britain’s motorways, Home Secretary Patel said yesterday, while Justice Minister Raab promised the Conservative Party conference to find £183m to double the number...
OVER the past two decades, the United States, Turkey, and the Zionist regime of Israel have faced ultimate defeat in any sedition that they’ve incited and have had to humiliatingly pull out of, writes the Iranian scholar Dr Sa’dollah Zarei. The fact of the matter is that if there is...
TORY Chancellor Rishi Sunak in his speech to the Tory Party conference yesterday pledged to ‘double down’ on his plans to resuscitate drowning British capitalism with a vicious austerity war on the working class. He warned that there was a cost to any recovery, pointing out that the vast government...
PRIME Minister Boris Johnson yesterday refused to rebut his Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s warning in Saturday’s Daily Mail newspaper that ‘very real shortages’ can be expected to carry on until Christmas. Appearing on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show, Johnson was asked if Sunak was right in predicting that the fuel and...
IRAN says Bahrain’s ‘despicable’ welcoming of Israeli foreign minister Yair Lapid to Manama is at odds with the will of the Bahraini people, stressing that the visit left an ‘unremovable stain’ on the reputation of the tiny Persian Gulf country’s rulers. In a statement on Friday, Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed...
PM BORIS Johnson has refused to rule out raising taxes again, on the first day of the Tory Party conference and just three weeks before the Chancellor announces his Budget. The prime minister said he was a ‘zealous opponent of unnecessary tax rises’. However, he admitted on the BBC’s Andrew...
AN activist who was deceived into a relationship with an undercover, spying police officer has won a tribunal case for breaches of her human rights. Kate Wilson met Mark Kennedy while he was posing as an environmental campaigner in Nottingham in 2003. It later emerged Kennedy had sexual relationships with as...
FAMILIES of the Beirut Port blast victims are continuing to protest against the suspension of the probe into the devastating explosion that took place in Lebanon on August 4th 2020 – warning that this is the ‘last opportunity for accountability’. About 300 protesters gathered last Wednesday by the Palace of...
THE METROPOLITAN police officer, PC Wayne Couzens, has been sentenced to life imprisonment after it was proven in court that on March 3, 2021 he, under the pretence of a ‘Covid patrol,’ stopped Sarah Everard as she was walking home, showed her his police warrant card, handcuffed her, kidnapped...
PC WAYNE Couzens, who kidnapped, raped and murdered Sarah Everard was sentenced yesterday to a ‘whole life order’, which means he will never be released from prison and will die behind bars. Labour MP Harriet Harman and ‘Mother of the House’ of Commons added her voice to the chorus of...
THE British medical journal The Lancet says more than half of police killings in the United States are unreported and Black Americans are most likely to experience fatal police violence Researchers compared data from the US National Vital Statistics System (NVSS) to three non-governmental, open-source databases on fatal police...
FURLOUGH ended today, with 1.6 million estimated to be still on the scheme while next Wednesday, the Tories will slash Universal Credit by £20 a week. Under these twin hammer blows, an estimated 2.5 million people will be forced to choose between heating and eating this winter. 1.5 million will be...