Monthly Archives: August 2022
TORY PARTY leadership contender Truss has defended the billions of profits being made by the energy companies amid the soaring price rises that are pauperising the masses of workers and their families, by saying profits should not be considered ‘dirty and evil’. The Tory leadership favourite said windfall taxes on...
THOUSANDS of Brazilians have taken to the streets amid concern President Jair Bolsonaro will try to stay in power even if he loses October’s election. Protesters marched in several cities on Thursday in defence of democracy, over fears the far-right leader would not respect the outcome of the vote.
Bolsonaro has...
TRAIN drivers belonging to ASLEF – the train drivers’ trade union which represents 96% of the train drivers in England, Scotland, and Wales – will strike today at nine train companies in Britain. ASLEF announced the one day strike, after the companies failed to make a pay offer to help...
‘FROM the river to the sea Palestine will be free,’ 1,000 people shouted outside Downing Street in Whitehall in central London on Wednesday evening. It was one of hundreds of demonstrations in towns and cities around the world against Israel and in support of Palestine following the Zionist regime’s massacre...
LONDON transport strikes are escalating with 1,100 TfL and Tube Unite members joining the planned August 19th strike, said Unite the union yesterday. A pay freeze last year and a 3% offer this year provoked the action. More than 1,000 TfL and London Underground (LU) workers will take strike action to...
FRENCH workers are fighting attacks on their pensions and health service. French trade union federation CGT has raised the alarm over hospital closures. On Saturday March 5, the population of the town of Guingamp, in the Côtes-d’Armor, strongly mobilised against the plan to close the 24-hour surgery department and the maternity...
THIS week, forecasts for the increase in household energy bills were dramatically increased to over £4,200 for an average UK household in January next year, with predictions it will reach over £5,000 during the year. Almost every week the forecast for the increases, as the regulator Ofgem increases the price...
AHEAD of the powerful one-day strike at nine major train privateers this Saturday, Aslef General Secretary Mick Whelan has accused one of them, Avanti West Coast, of ‘lying to passengers’ about the reasons it is unable to run the services it has promised to deliver. Whelan said yesterday: ‘We are...
Thousands of people in the Iranian capital, Tehran, staged a demonstration on Tuesday to express their support for the Palestinians and denounce the Israeli regime’s latest military onslaught against the Gaza Strip. The protesters gathered near Palestine Square in Tehran, where the Palestinian Embassy is located, carrying placards and flags...
POLICE in London have strip-searched 650 mostly Black children – most of whom were found to be innocent of the suspicions against them – over a two-year period, the UK’s children’s commissioner says. Slamming the Metropolitan Police record on child protection, Children’s Commissioner for England Dame Rachel de Souza said...
A NEW massacre of Palestinians, which left three people dead and more than 40 wounded, was committed by the Israeli occupation forces in the northern West Bank city of Nablus yesterday. Palestinian Prime Minister Muhammad Shtayyeh said: ‘While Gaza is recovering from its wounds and burying its dead from the...
OVER 2,000 journalists have signed the following statement in support of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. ‘If the US government can extradite Assange for this, it will clear the way for governments to criminalise any of us, anywhere in the world. ‘Julian Assange, founder and publisher of WikiLeaks, is currently detained in...
THE SENSE of alarm and downright terror mixed with a sense of helplessness amongst the British ruling class saturates the bourgeois press today as the reality of the capitalist crisis forces its way onto their pages. It can be most clearly seen in the articles in the Daily Telegraph, the...
A NATIONAL strike across South Africa against the rising costs of living, load shedding, and other economic challenges will take place on 24 August, the leadership of the South African Federation of Trade Unions (Saftu) has said. This was decided at SAFTU’s Working Class Summit in Boksburg last Friday.
The national...
Former Labour chancellor and prime minister Gordon Brown has stepped forward to offer himself up as the saviour of bankrupt British capitalism. Brown made his intervention over the weekend with the demand that the two Tory leadership candidates, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, along with the lame duck PM Boris...
IRAN’S Foreign Ministry spokesman has sharply criticised the Israeli regime’s latest deadly airstrikes in Gaza, condemning the international community’s inaction and silence about the illegal entity’s crimes against the Palestinian people. Nasser Kan’ani made the remarks in a post on his Twitter account on Sunday as Israeli jets continued to...
THE Leader of Lebanon’s Hezbollah resistance movement says the latest Israeli attack on the besieged Gaza Strip is an act of clear aggression and crime. Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah made the remarks in a nocturnal speech on the occasion of the lunar month of Muharram, while addressing the ongoing Israeli onslaught...
THE Palestinian Presidency has strongly condemned the ‘dangerous Israeli escalation against our people in the Gaza Strip, which so far has resulted in the killing of 32 Palestinians and the injury of nearly 250 others’. The Presidency also condemned the Israeli escalation in the Al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied Jerusalem by...
ISRAEL hit Gaza with air strikes yesterday afternoon. Palestinian medical sources said at least seven Palestinians were killed. This includes a 5-year-old girl. 44 others were wounded in a series of Israeli airstrikes on multiple targets in the Gaza Strip, and includes a residential apartment in the neighbourhood of Al-Rimal in...
IN a ‘blunt message’ to the BBC the Bank of England governor yesterday warned that interest rates may have to rise even higher, saying there is a ‘real risk’ of soaring prices becoming ‘embedded’. He has just raised interest rates to 1.75% – the biggest rise in 27 years –...
THE Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) yesterday increased interest rates to 1.75% – the highest in 27 years. It warned of 13% inflation and the pound has dropped after the Bank warned the UK will fall into a long recession. Sterling was down half a cent at $1.2090, yesterday...
A TOP Iranian official says Israel has been caught off guard and is encircled by the resistance front, adding that normalisation of ties between the Tel Aviv regime and some Arab states laid bare relations that had developed behind the scenes. Kamal Kharrazi, the head of Iran's Strategic Council on...
YESTERDAY nine members of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee voted to increase the interest rate from 1.25% to 1.75%. This is the sixth increase in interest rates this year as interest rates have shot up from 0.1% in December 2021 and have now increased by 0.5%, the highest...
LANDLORDS face a potential Tory cash bonanza with nothing to stop them holding on to the £400 energy bill rebate which the government is paying over to them for each tenant, Shelter warned yesterday. Tenants are ‘at the mercy of their landlord passing on this much-needed support,’ said the housing...
SAFTU (South African Federation of Trade Unions) has convened a Working Class Summit on Friday August 5 ‘to prepare a fight back’. It said: ‘In carrying out the National Executive Committee (NEC) resolution of the South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU), the Extended Steering Committee of the Working Class...
AT A TIME when the cost of living is rocketing Tory leadership contender Truss has been forced to publicly scrap her plan to link public sector pay to local living costs following a backlash from Tory MPs and opposition parties, and a very angry response from millions of workers...
TORY leadership candidate Liz Truss was forced into a humiliating U-Turn yesterday, after saying in a ‘hustings’ meeting on Monday night that, as Prime Minister, she would abolish national pay for nurses, civil servants and other public sector workers and impose ‘regional pay’ instead. Truss claimed that her plans would...
Such is the depth of the crisis in British capitalism that even the ultra-loyal Tory press can no longer pretend that the working class is not on the verge of insurrectionary revolt and that capitalism is on its last legs. This was made clear in an article in the Daily...
The HEZBOLLAH Lebanese resistance movement does not rule out going to war with Israel over the regime’s attempts to move in on Lebanon’s natural resources. The movement’s Secretary-General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah made the remarks on Sunday, amid a maritime dispute that escalated in early July, after the Israeli regime moved...
‘I’m 100 per cent for a general strike,’ Communication Workers Union (CWU) Capital Branch Assistant Secretary and BT Tower rep Darren Weller said yesterday morning. Weller was speaking to News Line on the picket line outside the iconic central London tower as 40,000 BT & Openreach CWU members held the...
A MASSIVE staff survey carried out by the RMT railway workers union reveals the dystopian future awaiting passengers if the industry privateers and the government are allowed to force their rail cuts through. Rail workers paint a chilling picture of the future awaiting passengers if the brutal cuts being proposed...
OVER one-in-eight UK households live in fear that they can’t make any further cuts to spending to pay the massive increase in energy bills that will hit them in the autumn. Energy bills are set to increase to nearly £4,000 next January, which represents an increase of three times the...
LARGE numbers of Labour MPs will attend Communication Workers Union (CWU) picket lines again today, in defiance of the anti-union stance taken by party leader Sir Keir Starmer. Commenting on ‘a momentous day’ for the union last Friday, that is now set to be repeated today, deputy general secretary Andy...
THE family of slain Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was shot dead by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank in May, has called for ‘meaningful action’ against Israel by the Biden administration. In company with several American lawmakers, the family held a news conference outside the US Capitol...
LABOUR is becoming ‘irrelevant to workers’ and it is now hard to justify handing the party millions in funding, the leader of the Unite union, Sharon Graham has warned in an interview with the Observer newspaper. She added that Labour’s leadership was, in effect, sticking two fingers up at workers...