Monthly Archives: January 2023
MILLIONS of Britons are cold, hungry and struggling to get medical care this winter amid the cost-of living-crisis. Almost a quarter of adults have not been able to ‘keep comfortably warm’ in the two weeks before they were surveyed, reports the Office of National Statistics (ONS). As many fear running out...
Israel has announced plans to provide illegal settlers with firearms and weapons in response to the recent retaliatory operations by Palestinians, which killed at least seven illegal settlers in occupied East Jerusalem, amid escalating violence in the occupied territories. Speaking after an emergency meeting late on Saturday, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed...
THE BANK of England is due to meet this week to announce an increase in interest rates, with ‘experts’ predicting an increase of 0.5% pushing them up to 4.5%. This will be the tenth successive increase in the past year, with interest rates in the UK now at the highest...
UCU lecturers at their emergency branch meeting yesterday demanded that the TUC organise a national demonstration and march to parliament on its 1st February ‘Day of Action’ tomorrow as the start of an indefinite general strike against the government’s anti-strike bill. The resolution from UCU CONEL (College of North East London)...
COLLECTIVE government failures regarding building regulations ‘over many years’ were partly to blame for the Grenfell Tower fire, Housing Secretary Michael Gove has said. He said a new contract to be published today will tell developers who built unsafe buildings ‘to make them safe’. ‘We haven’t done right by the bereaved...
THE TORIES are announcing new anti-NHS plans today, opening up ‘virtual wards’ in which patients will be monitored in their homes, with cameras at the foot of their beds. They will say that the measures will enable some, particularly the frail elderly, to be monitored at home by doctors using...
SOUTH African health unions demonstrated outside the Health Ministry in Pretoria on Friday demanding that the ANC government increase the health care budget and start a major recruitment drive so that there are more doctors and other health care workers in the country’s hospitals. The South African Medical Association Trade...
UK capitalism is now the sick man of the capitalist world. Its economy is going broke while the Tories openly discuss knifing the NHS, and smashing all public services to make the working class and the poor pay for their crisis. At the same time, the Tory party itself is...
THE new Israeli government, which includes known fascists, is now engaging in murderous attacks on the Palestinian people as it pushes to create many new settlements and drive the Palestinian people out of Palestine. The President of the State of Palestine, Mahmoud Abbas, has chaired an emergency meeting of the...
‘IT’S HEART-breaking and wrong’ that a million children under 4 are growing up in poverty, says the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) charity. Almost 3 in 10 children in families where the youngest child is aged under five (28%) or primary school age, between 5 and 10 years (29%), have experienced...
THE Royal College of Midwives is warning of a worsening maternity crisis as a senior midwife survey shows services at boiling point. ‘The maternity crisis we warned about is here.’ That’s the message from the Royal College of Midwives (RCM) as a survey of UK senior midwives says they are...
‘WHILE more than 2 million of us took to the streets on January 19th, a new day of inter-union mobilisation is scheduled for Tuesday January 31,’ the giant French trade union, the CGT, has announced. ‘General assemblies of employees, in different professional sectors, are now debating the continuation of the...
IT was with much fanfare that the TUC announced on the 10th January that it would hold a national ‘protect the right to strike’ day on Wednesday 1st February. This announcement promised that more information would be provided in the coming weeks about planned activities along with the vow by...
TORY education secretary Gillian Keegan is trying to get next week’s strike action by 100,000 members of the National Education Union (NEU) outlawed, claiming that the union broke the anti-union laws with the timing of its ballot results announcement and how it informed schools. Letters published by the NEU show...
A WASHINGTON-based think tank has warned that the NATO military alliance and the United States are ‘creeping closer to the catastrophic scenario’ in Ukraine, threatening a direct war between Moscow and Washington. In an article published on Responsible Statecraft on Monday, Branko Marcetic said the US and the military alliance...
THE RUSSIAN armed forces will destroy US-made M1 Abrams tanks and other NATO military equipment if they are supplied to Ukraine, Russian Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Antonov said yesterday. He added that ‘An analysis of the entire sequence of Washington’s actions shows that the Americans are constantly raising...
TIM SHARP, the TUC senior policy officer for employment rights, has published an article entitled ‘Fighting the Anti-Strike Law’. He states: ‘The government is attempting to rush through Parliament new laws that could undermine workers’ ability to take strike action to defend their pay and conditions.’ He adds: ‘The Strikes (Minimum...
PICKET lines were mounted outside hundreds of ambulance stations across the country on Monday as 23,000 Unison, Unite and GMB paramedics and other ambulance workers went on 24-hour-strike. At Kenton ambulance station in Kingsbury, northwest London on Monday evening there was a lively picket with food and a brazier. Mary McNeil,...
IN advance of the national ‘protect the right to strike’ day of demonstrations on Wednesday 1st February the TUC has published a statement headed ‘Fighting the anti-strike laws’. This statement calls the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill a ‘draconian piece of legislation’ that the TUC believes to be ‘undemocratic’ in...
PICKET lines outside ambulance stations around the country received a cacophony of support from passing vehicles as 23,000 ambulance worker members of Unison, the GMB and Unite went on strike again yesterday. Richard Kingham, a motorcycle paramedic picketing the London Ambulance Service headquarters on Waterloo Road in central London, told...
A dozen youth organisations marched through Paris on Saturday afternoon against the government’s pension age hike from 62 to 64, following last Thursday’s mass demonstrations in all French towns and cities by millions of workers, trade unions, students and youth. Actively supported by the left-wing France Unbowed party, the marchers shouted: ‘Resistance!’,...
NADHIM Zahawi, the Tory Party Chairman and ex Chancellor of the Exchequer, has for months been avoiding questions about his tax affairs, but on Friday all this came to a head when the Guardian newspaper revealed that he had settled a tax bill worth millions while serving as Chancellor. According...
‘GENUINELY I believe that they are looking that this is the moment that they can privatise the NHS,’ Unite General Secretary Sharon Graham said yesterday. Graham is joining striking North West Ambulance Service workers on the picket line in Chorley, Lancashire at 7.30am this morning as 2,500 Unite members in...
THE HUGE picket of around 400 nurses on the steps of University College Hospital (UCH) on the Euston Road in central London was featured in all the news reports of the Royal College of Nursing’s two days of strike action last Wednesday and Thursday. A colossal sound of nurses chanting...
THE head of the UK’s Unite trade union has accused the government of having a ‘sinister reason’ for ‘not doing a deal’ with nurses to end their strike action. Sharon Graham, general secretary of Unite, said the government is looking to privatise the NHS, which is why it ‘won’t come...
UNITE General Secretary Sharon Graham pledged her union would stand against the Westminster government’s ‘scorched earth’ approach in imposing brutal cuts on schools and education in Northern Ireland. ‘The government’s demand that the Education Authority in Northern Ireland somehow deliver cuts of more than £110 million before the end of...
THE US RULING CLASS has hit its debt limit, with the Treasury Department now taking measures to try to prevent a devastating default. Reaching the debt ceiling means the US government is not allowed to borrow any more money – unless Congress agrees to suspend or change the cap, which...
SAFTU – the South African Federation of Trade Unions – notes the stubborn inflation which remains high above 7%, and averaged 7,2% in December 2022. It says: ‘Our members and the working class at large had the most difficult December as prices of food sat at 12,4%.
‘Even though statistics showed...
RCN NURSES from King’s College Hospital in south London marched from their picket line to the Camberwell Abellio bus garage yesterday, to bring greetings and to unify the two struggles for higher pay against the Tories. Then the Unite bus drivers marched up to and joined the nurses pickets outside...
FRANCE was gripped by a nationwide strike yesterday with schools closed and trains grinding to a halt as workers walked out in anger at a planned pension reform that would push the retirement age up by 2 years to age 64. Eight of the biggest unions in France had called...
RUSSIA’S victory is unavoidable. It is based on the unity of the Russian people, the heroism of special operation fighters and the operation of the military-industrial complex (MIC), Russian President Vladimir Putin said during his visit to the Obukhov State Plant (an Almaz-Antey subsidiary) on Wednesday. The head of state...
‘PEOPLE aren’t dying because nurses are striking, nurses are striking because people are dying,’ RCN General Secretary and Chief Executive, Pat Cullen, said yesterday. ‘Today’s record number of unfilled nurse jobs cannot be left to get worse, pay nursing staff fairly to turn this around and give the public the care they...
WORKERS’ lives continue to be in danger due to the unsafe working conditions at Bangladesh’s shipbreaking yards. Two accidents occurred on 12 January in two separate yards, killing one worker and severely injuring the other.
40-year old Rashedul Islam was killed at Tanseen Steels Ltd. after a rope used to pull...
YESTERDAY’S mass picket lines outside NHS hospitals are a direct result of the fact that the Tory government is insulting workers and will not even discuss a nurses’ pay rise for this year. Instead it discusses the privatisation of the NHS! Nurses and health care workers, and all workers, would...
ASLEF and RMT railway workers are to strike on Wednesday 1st February, joining 100,000 PCS civil servants, 100,000 NEU teachers and tens of thousands of UCU lecturers in striking on that day – the day the TUC has designated as Right to Strike Day. ASLEF stated yesterday that is has...
STRIKING nurses are marching on Downing Street today, leaving UCLH (University College London Hospital) at 2.30pm, as nursing staff go on strike in what the RCN described yesterday as its ‘most widespread protest so far against unfair pay and unsafe staffing’. The RCN is striking today and tomorrow and has...
OVER 2,000 trade unionists, workers and youth joined an emergency 6.00pm demonstration called by the trade unions in Whitehall opposite Downing Street on Monday night, as the new Tory anti-strike bill had its second reading in the House of Commons. While Tory Business Secretary Grant Shapps was boasting to MPs...
DAVID Carrick, a serving Metropolitan Police officer, admitted 49 offences in court on Monday, pleading guilty to 24 rape charges, and false imprisonments, and indecent assaults. Carrick pleaded guilty to 49 offences involving 12 women in Hertfordshire and London between 2003 and 2020. The multiple nature of these attacks on the...
TORY prime minister Rishi Sunak announced yesterday that the government will be tabling fresh amendments to the Public Order Bill, being debated in the House of Lords this week, to give the police even greater powers to ban demonstrations and crack down on any disruption to ‘public order’. Sunak said...
PROTESTS are continuing throughout Peru demanding the resignation of President-designate Dina Boluarte, the closing of the Congress, the advancement of elections in 2023, and the release of former Peruvian President Pedro Castillo. The Peruvian Public Prosecutor’s Office confirmed last Friday that 329 people had been arrested since the beginning of...
NEU (National Education Union) members in England and Wales and support staff in Wales have voted overwhelmingly for strike action and the ballot has successfully surpassed the restrictive thresholds set by government for strike action. The question put was: ‘Are you prepared to take strike action in furtherance of this...
ON SATURDAY, the BMA held a rally to launch its campaign for Pay Restoration. Balloting opened for strike action on 9th January and votes must be received by 20 February. Over 300 junior doctors attended the rally at Central Hall Westminster in central London.
Mick Lynch, general secretary of the RMT...
Prof Philip Banfield, Chairman of BMA Council had opened the rally. He said: ‘Every day I am 100% committed to restoring your pay and doing my utmost. ‘Our amazing speakers include the indomitable Mick Lynch. He has raised the profile of his own members with regard to safety, He cuts...
THE sight of the junior doctors of the British Medical Association and the RMT union beginning to form an alliance in order to defend the NHS and fight the savage anti-union laws that are being prepared so as to keep wages even lower, has brought an immediate response from...