Monthly Archives: December 2021
THE JOHNSON government faces an expected rebellion by about 60 Conservative MPs in tomorrow’s House of Commons votes to pass new ‘Plan B’ Covid-19 regulations. This will mean that the parliamentary Tory Party is split and that the Johnson government will have to rely on opposition Labour votes in order...
THE United Nations General Assembly has approved a resolution declaring that the Israeli regime’s decision to impose its jurisdiction in Syria’s Golan Heights with the aim of changing the character and legal status of the strategic territory are ‘null and void’ and constitute a flagrant violation of international law. On...
WITH the North Shropshire by-election looming on Thursday, just two days after the vote in Parliament on Boris Johnson’s Plan B to try and restrain the fast-moving and fast-developing Omicron Covid-19 variant, both the Tory Party and the Labour opposition are in their biggest crisis since the Second World...
GOVIA must be stripped of all franchises and a wider review launched says RMT as the ‘fatally compromised’ review into Southeastern Rail Franchise finds ‘serious errors over several years’. Transport union RMT demanded on Thursday that Govia be stripped of its remaining rail franchise and called on the Department for...
WIKILEAKS founder Julian Assange’s threat of extradition to the US became even more imminent yesterday as the High Court ruled in favour of the US. The US won its appeal and overturned a previous ruling in January that Assange cannot be extradited because of concerns over his mental health. Assange...
THE MAJORITY of gig economy workers are injured at work and suffer from sprains, cuts that require stitches, and even fractures and broken bones. According to a survey by OnePoll of 1,000 gig economy workers, 85% of the 59% injured were unable to work for an average of five weeks.
However,...
WHEN The Daily Telegraph carries as its banner headline ‘Beginning of the end for Boris?’ then it is certain that plots to dump him are growing by the hour. The article, written by Allister Heath, opens: ‘There is an overpowering fin-de-regime stench emanating from Downing Street that can no longer...
ALMOST six million people are waiting to have hospital treatment in England, the latest NHS monthly performance statistics revealed yesterday. The number of patients on the waiting list for non-urgent surgery such as hip or knee replacements or cataract operation rose to 5,975,216 in October, the highest since records began...
‘I REPEAT that I have been repeatedly assured since these allegations emerged that there was no party and that no Covid rules were broken,’ Tory PM Johnson insisted during PMQs yesterday. He stuck to his line even though footage has emerged showing Downing Street staff joking about a lockdown Christmas...
FROM THE ELECTRONIC INTIFADA DUTCH judges ruled on Tuesday that two top Israeli military commanders cannot be sued for killing a Palestinian family in the Gaza Strip. The appeals court in The Hague decided that the commanders enjoy ‘functional immunity’ because they were acting on behalf of the Israeli state. The decision...
ON TUESDAY the Unite union, which has 100,000 members working in the health sector, wrote to every member of the House of Lords urging them to oppose the Tory Health and Care Bill which had its second reading in the House of Lords that day. The letter sets out the...
THE RMT ann-ounced yesterday that it is to ballot all of its London Transport members for strike action from Monday as TfL (Transport for London) announced the first phase of mass job cuts. The RMT confirmed that it will begin a ballot of over 10,000 members across all grades. The railway...
MONDAY night’s BBC Panorama documentary exposed the operations of HC-One, which, with 265 facilities and a bed capacity of 16,116, is the UK’s largest care home operator. HC-One is owned by a company run by millionaire Saudi Olympic showjumper Kamal Bahamdan.
The UK social care system is facing collapse, with a...
RAPHAEL Marshall, ex-Foreign Office desk official and now whistleblower, has exposed the way British and US imperialism dumped their Afghan allies and left them to their fate, while they desperately sought to evacuate their own forces. In fact, US and UK troops did the Taliban’s job for them, policing the...
AMAZON warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama, USA are getting a second vote on unionising, after a National Labour Relations Board (NLRB) official ruled in favour of a revote after finding that the e-commerce giant improperly interfered in the first election. It is a major victory for the Retail, Wholesale and...
THE PUBLIC inquiry into the Grenfell Tower fire, that claimed 72 lives in June 2017, entered its second phase yesterday to examine how the tower block came to be coated in deadly flammable materials – materials that turned the block into an incendiary fireball. In an opening statement, Stephanie Barwise...
THE GRENFELL Inquiry heard yesterday that the government ‘concealed the risks of building safety’ and that deregulation ‘should be regarded as one of the major scandals of our time’. The allegations were made by Stephanie Barwise QC, representing some of the bereaved, survivors and residents, who told the inquiry yesterday:...
PRESIDENT Vladimir Putin has warned that Russia will act if the US-led NATO military alliance crosses its red lines in Ukraine. Speaking at an investment forum in Moscow, Putin said the expansion of NATO military infrastructure in Ukraine was a red line he hoped would not be crossed. The president further...
THE United States, and its NATO allies, with the UK in the lead, and the right wing Ukrainian regime out in front are daily accusing Moscow of massing troops near Ukraine’s border for an invasion, which they say may be imminent. Russia has responded by saying that there is no...
IT IS ‘totally unacceptable’, that over 4,000 households in North East England remain without power more than nine days after Storm Arwen tore down power lines on 26th November, Tory Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng admitted yesterday. Speaking on a visit to St John’s Chapel in County Durham, Kwarteng said: ‘I...
THE PALESTINIAN Mission to the United Kingdom condemned the British government’s decision to designate the political wing of the Hamas movement a ‘terrorist organisation’, and described it as a retrograde step that will make peace-making harder and diminish the UK’s role. The decision showed that the UK was more interested...
YESTERDAY Unite, the trade union with 1.4 million members, announced it will cut political donations to the Labour party and divert the money to union campaigns. Unite said it would still pay £1 million in affiliation fees to Labour but would divert other funds to union causes instead of funnelling...
OVER 300 University and College Union (UCU) striking lecturers and student supporters rallied and marched to the Royal Exchange Building in the City of London yesterday. Speaking to News Line as they assembled in Tavistock Square, Development Studies lecturer Lisa Tulley said: ‘I’m quite lucky because I’m on a permanent...
TUBE UNION RMT went ahead with strike action by tube drivers on Friday night. The action is over the ripping up of existing agreements and working arrangements in advance of the Night Tube reopening which the union says will wreck work life balance by bulldozing through additional night and weekend...
TORY science minister George Freeman admitted yesterday that the government had rejected the advice of its own experts at SAGE over restrictions designed to hold back the spread of the new Covid Omicron variant in Britain. Freeman made his admission after leaked minutes from a meeting of Sage revealed that...
RESIDENTS of G15 housing association are going ‘on strike’ and refusing to pay service charge bill increases in response to their monthly payments having risen – by up to 500 per cent! In fact social housing tenants and shared owners have experienced such increases via their monthly service charge payments....
ON THE SECOND day of the three-day strike of 58 universities’ at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in central London yesterday striking Unison cleaners joined striking UCU lecturers on the picket line. Toanna Beata told the News Line that conditions were’ too much for the postroom workers...
AS MANY AS 700 people died on the streets while homeless last year, official estimates show, and the number is in reality likely to be much higher. An estimated 688 people died while homeless in England and Wales in 2020, new official figures have shown. Despite the total being an 11.6%...
AS PART of the nationwide three-day strike to combat pay and pension cuts to university staff, a team of over 40 activists from unions across Sheffield University rallied together on picket lines yesterday morning. Sheffield University was one of 58 universities that began their three-day strike across the country. In Sheffield,...
‘The cuts to education spending over the last decade are effectively without precedent in post-war UK history, including a 9% real-terms fall in school spending per pupil and a 14% fall in spending per student in colleges.’ So opens the new 2021 Annual Report on Education Spending in England by...
ON TUESDAY Tory Foreign Secretary Liz Truss used a photo opportunity to stake out her bid to replace Boris Johnson as Prime Minister. The photo of her, decked out in body armour and helmet, on top of a British army tank in Estonia, threatening Russia, was a direct copy of...
THREE consecutive days of strike action hitting 58 universities begin this morning after university bosses and their representatives refused to withdraw pension cuts or address falling pay and worsening working conditions. After notifying vice chancellors that staff would take strike action unless they saw movement, their union, the University College...
Israel ‘indefensibly prevents dozens of Palestinian journalists from travelling as a punishment for their journalistic work or expression of their opinions,’ Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor said in a report released on Monday. Entitled ‘Punishing Journalists: Israel’s Restrictions on Freedom of Movement,’ the report documents cases in which the Israeli intelligence...
MEMBERS of the University and College Union (UCU) at 58 universities across the UK have come out on a three day strike, starting today, over attacks on their pensions, pay, workloads and the casualisation of lecturers and teaching staff. The ballot for strike action called by UCU confusingly split the...