Monthly Archives: July 2022
THE EMERGENCY anti-union regulations, passed in the House of Commons by 289 votes to 202 on Monday night, are set to be used to break strikes, and to break the strike movement that has erupted as wages are slashed by galloping inflation. Rail, bus, air transport, post office and NHS...
RMT General Secretary Mick Lynch has welcomed the overwhelming strike vote by ASLEF members in eight train operating companies, setting the scene for a powerful national strike of the entire rail network. RMT leader Lynch said yesterday: ‘We congratulate our friends in ASLEF for their superb ballot result and the...
LAST night’s BBC Panorama programme revealed yet more evidence of unlawful killings of Afghans by members of the Special Air Service (SAS) during the illegal invasion of the country by US and British imperialism. According to the investigation, a pattern has emerged involving SAS special forces engaged in night raids....
AT LEAST eight media workers were beaten and violently assaulted by security forces and police during live coverage of Saturdays anti-government protest outside Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe’s residence. The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) and its Sri Lankan affiliates, the Free Media Movement (FMM) and the Sri Lanka Working Journalists...
HUNDREDS of striking criminal barristers held mass pickets outside the Supreme Court in London yesterday, as well as outside Preston, Plymouth and Birmingham Crown Courts, at the start of their latest round of action. Barristers began a fight for a 25% rise in Legal Aid fees with a two-day strike...
RUSSIAN President Vladimir Putin ‘prevented a humanitarian catastrophe when he launched the special operation in Ukraine,’ speaker of the Russian State Duma (lower parliament house) Vyacheslav Volodin said on Sunday. The Russian president ‘has done his best to ensure Russia’s security,’ to protect people living in the Donetsk and Lugansk...
IN ADVANCE of last night’s vote in parliament on the Tory bill waging war on the right to strike by allowing employers to bring in ‘agency’ scabs to break strikes, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) issued a grovelling appeal to MPs to reject ‘pernicious anti-union measures’ that threaten public...
The United Nations (UN) has warned that the Israeli regime’s forcible mass eviction of over 1,200 Palestinians from their homes in the Masafer Yatta area of the occupied West Bank amounts to a ‘war crime’. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in a statement on...
THE Sri Lankan workers and youth have shown the way forward to the workers of the world, and to the workers of the UK in particular, about how to deal with a ruling class that is intent on pushing the whole weight of the worldwide economic crisis onto the...
LENIN in his book Left Wing Communism an Infantile Disorder writes about the ‘fundamental law of revolution.’ He states: ‘For a revolution to take place it is not enough for the exploited and oppressed masses to realise the impossibility of living in the old way, and demand changes; ‘For a...
THE Fire Brigades Union has formally reported two fire and rescue services to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), and identified several others, in relation to bringing in a policy which would see firefighters sent into fires with their breathing equipment turned off, in a letter first published on...
RAIL unions ASLEF and TSSA have announced that they will ballot their members for strike action on the railways. If the ASLEF ballot is successful it will be the first time train drivers have had a national strike since 1995. On the news that TSSA and Aslef balloting their members, RMT...
‘IT IS clearly now the will of the Parliamentary Conservative Party that there should be a new leader of that party and therefore a new PM and I’ve agreed with Sir Graham Brady, the chairman of our backbench MPs, that process of choosing that leader should begin now. ‘The timetable...
ALL of the Isle of Wight’s Southampton-to-Cowes ferries will shut down during summer holidays as 120 workers take strike action against Red Funnel and its billionaire owners to fight poverty pay, Unite announced on Wednesday. The majority of the 120 Red Funnel staff working on the Isle of Wight route...
BORIS Johnson finally resigned as Prime Minister early yesterday after more than 50 Tory ministers and aides jumped ship and left him floundering to fill any government ministerial posts. Even Nadhim Zahawi, appointed just two days ago to replace Rishi Sunak as Chancellor quit urging Johnson to resign for the...
BORIS Johnson has insisted he will stay in office, despite a growing Tory revolt against his leadership. At Prime Minister’s Questions, he said he had a ‘colossal mandate’ from the 2019 election and would ‘keep going’. So far, since yesterday 34 Tories had quit government or party positions, with other backbenchers...
THE BMA’s annual conference has called for restoring pay to 2008 levels and for GPCEngland to organise the withdrawal of GP practices from Primary Care Networks (PCNs). The Annual Representative Meeting (ARM) of the British Medical Association (BMA) took place in Brighton from 27th to 29th June and was largely...
THE TORY Party is now in its biggest ever crisis, after the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Health Secretary both resigned on Tuesday evening. Health Secretary Javid, in his resignation letter to PM Johnson, said: ‘We may not have always been popular, but we have been competent in acting...
DOWNING Street did not tell the truth when it said Boris Johnson was unaware of official complaints about Chris Pincher’s misbehaviour, a former senior civil servant in the Foreign Office said yesterday. Former Foreign Office Permanent Secretary, Simon McDonald, insisted that Johnson had been ‘briefed in person’ about an investigation...
‘JERMAINE was dead before he got into the car on 11th December 2016,’ Jermaine Baker’s mother Margaret Smith said yesterday, She was speaking after an inquiry judge ruled that the Metropolitan Police had ‘lawfully’ shot and killed her 28-year-old son. Baker was unarmed when he was shot dead by a Met...
SOUTH Africa’s trade unions have been meeting with their members to discuss the proposed wage offer from energy giant Eskom, after a proposed agreement was drafted during wage deliberations over the weekend. The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) confirmed that they would be be meeting with Eskom...
THE TORY government is attempting to assume the absolute power to censor the internet as part of its new Online Safety Bill – a move that has been condemned even by the House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee. The Online Safety Bill has been promoted by...
OVER seventy campaigners demanding the release of Julian Assange attended a party outside Belmarsh prison on Sunday to celebrate his 51st birthday. Assange has been held in Belmarsh since he was forcibly taken from the Ecuadorian embassy in April 2019. Maxine Walker, addressing the gathering, said that the Committee to Defend...
‘OUR CRIMINAL justice system is in crisis, it’s no exaggeration to say it’s in meltdown,’ Criminal Bar Association (CBA) Chairman Jo Sidhu QC told a mass picket and rally of striking barristers and their supporters outside the Royal Courts of Justice yesterday morning. ‘Junior barristers are on only £12,500 a...
IRANIAN Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian and his Syrian counterpart, Faisal Mekdad, have reiterated their countries’ absolute determination to resolve the problems in the region, vowing to respond to Israel’s threats and confront its aggression. In a joint press conference held in the Syrian capital Damascus on Saturday night, the two...
THE COMPLETE demoralisation of the Tories has dominated the front pages of the bourgeois press, with reports that PM Boris Johnson is facing a ‘Cabinet backlash’ over the latest scandal engulfing the government over yet more sleaze allegations. Ministers are reported to be evading at all costs the humiliation of...
‘A NUMBER of our hospitals are literally falling down,’ Nigel Edwards, Chief Executive of the Nuffield Trust health think tank said yesterday as he ridiculed PM Johnson’s claim that the Tory government will build 40 new hospitals by 2030. Edwards was speaking after the National Audit Office (NAO) announced that...
HAMAS, the resistance movement, says Palestinians should keep up the ‘armed resistance’ against Israeli occupation in the West Bank, after one of the regime’s military commanders was wounded by gunfire in clashes in Nablus. In a statement on Thursday, Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum hailed the Palestinians’ resistance in Nablus and...
A CHINESE attack on Taiwan is not imminent, the top US general Mark Milley has told the BBC, but the US is nervously watching it ‘very closely’. Taiwan is where the remnants of the defeated Kuomintang fled in 1949 after the victory of the Chinese revolution, led by the working...
NATO has officially declared Russia the ‘most significant and direct threat’ to the security of its members. This marks a radical strategic shift spurred by the Russian military offensive against Ukraine. In a document that defines the alliance’s strategic outlook for the next decade, titled Strategic Concept 2022, NATO said...
A ROW has broken out over £30m from the Welsh government’s budget being put towards the £1bn the UK is sending to Ukraine to prosecute the war against Russia. The money has come from Welsh ministers’ capital budget, used to fund projects such as hospitals and roads. Finance Minister Rebecca...
DOCTORS union the BMA yesterday responded to the shocking latest England GP workforce data and Health Foundation forecasts, showing a dramatic slump in the number of GPs. Analysis from the Health Foundation forecasts a shortage of up to the equivalent of 20,400 full-time GPs in England by 2030, and new...
BY MIRIAM AMANCAY COLQUE – Bartolina Sisa Resistance ON JUNE 15, 2022, in the Coup d’etat II case, the 1st Court of Anti-corruption read the 10 years sentence in prison for the self-proclaimed ‘president’ Jeanine Anez and for William Kaliman, former Commander of the Armed Forces and Vladimir Yuri Calderon,...
ON WEDNESDAY, the Governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, speaking at the European Central Bank’s annual policy forum, warned that soaring inflation would hit the UK harder than any other major economy during the current energy crisis. He said Britain faces a faster and steeper downturn as households...