Monthly Archives: April 2023
THE US House of Representatives on Wednesday narrowly passed a bill to raise the government’s $31.4 trillion debt ceiling, while also attaching sweeping, massive spending cuts for the next decade. The 217-215 vote was a win for Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who hopes to entice Biden into negotiations on...
THE TORY government’s new asylum bill will allow thousands of refugee children who are separated from their parents to be locked up, according to the Refugee Council and Barnardo’s. An analysis by the charities reveals that nearly 15,000 children who have come to the UK alone having fled terror in...
GPs HAVE voted overwhelmingly to ballot for industrial action if ‘disastrous’ changes to their working contract, which they say threaten patient safety, are not reviewed in the coming months. The vote took place at an emergency meeting of the BMA’s General Practitioners Committee in England (GPCE) yesterday, with 98% of...
YESTERDAY, the High Court in London ruled that the strike action by nurses on May 2nd was unlawful under existing Tory anti-union laws. Pat Cullen, head of the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) had previously said that taking the RCN to court was treating nurses as ‘criminals’. Cullen is correct, the...
WHILE Israel on Wednesday celebrated 75 years of its creation, Palestinians in Israel commemorated 75 years of their dispersion and what is known as the Nakba, or catastrophe. Thousands of Palestinians in Israel took part on Wednesday in what they called the March of Return which took them to villages...
HUNDREDS of thousands of members of the National Education Union (NEU) are on strike in 23,400 schools throughout England and Wales today and next Tuesday. There are thousands of picket lines outside schools around the country, with 300,000 teachers demanding a pay rise in line with inflation. Teachers are striking following...
Students from several Atlanta-area colleges, including Emory University, Georgia State University, and Morehouse College, staged a demonstration on Monday to halt the construction of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Centre. The protest comes after the release of the DeKalb County Medical Examiner’s report on the death of Manuel Esteban Paez...
HUW PILL, the chief economist at the Bank of England, has made the official position of the bankers crystal clear when he insisted that British families must ‘accept that they’re worse off’ as inflation spirals and that they must accept this and most certainly not demand increased pay. Pill, an...
FRENCH trade union federation the CGT is calling ‘on the entire world of work to make May Day a powerful day of demonstration to demand the withdrawal of pension reform, and for peace and social justice in France and everywhere in the world.’ Before the May Day demonstrations, which the...
On Monday, over 180 UK health professionals and representatives from leading medical bodies sent a letter to Tory prime minister Rishi Sunak denouncing the plans to transport asylum seekers to Rwanda, warning it will cause ‘catastrophic mental and physical harm’ to people seeking sanctuary. The letter, signed by the British...
DR Mary Bousted, the joint general secretary of the National Education Union (NEU), made a last minute plea to the Tories on Sunday for the resumption of pay talks to avert the strike by teachers across England on Thursday over a pay demand for a 15% increase. This drew an...
‘BRING us back in-house – people before profit!’ demanded striking NHS support staff on their picket line outside the Maudsley Hospital in Denmark Hill, Camberwell, yesterday morning. It was the second day of a 48-hour strike by 170 GMB union members employed by the privateer ISS at the South London...
Ardent Theatre Company presents Strike! by Tracy Ryan
The Large Theatre, Southwark Playhouse, 77-85 Newington Causeway, London SE1 6BD
Mon-Sat: 19:30, Tues & Sat: 15:00
Running Time: 90 minutes, 13th April-6 May 2023
Ticket Prices: £28.50/£23 Concession/All Previews £16 DUNNE’S Stores, Dublin, July 1984: A South African grapefruit starts something that will take nearly three...
‘HOW low can a government stoop?’ Royal College of Nursing (RCN) leader Pat Cullen asked yesterday in response to Tory Health Secretary Stephen Barclay’s ‘blatant threat’ to end the career of striking nurses. Barclay announced last Friday that the employers are taking out a case in the High Court to...
LAST Friday, the leadership of the Communication Workers Union (CWU) finally revealed to their members in Royal Mail (RM), details of the treacherous sell-out deal they had reached with RM management 7 days before. A ballot of 115,000 members of the CWU voted for strike action by 97% in July...
SECURITY workers at three major German airports have waged the first of yet another round of strikes called by the country’s ver.di trade union, leading to the cancellation of nearly 700 departing flights. An estimated 100,000 people were affected by the protest action over low pay waged by aviation security...
BRITISH CAPITALISM is clearly the weakest link in the chain of major capitalist states. Its fervent support for an imperialist war against Russia in the Ukraine has led to worldwide inflation of food and energy prices that has completely undermined it, and brought food shortages to the UK and many...
SPENDING CUTS, job losses and pension attacks must end, the RMT told the London Mayor yesterday. The Tube workers’ union wrote to Sadiq Khan, emphasising the importance of station staff to the safe running of London Underground and the need for the mayor to resist Tory budget cuts. In the letter,...
Young Socialists call on all YS Members to join:
May Day March
Monday, 1st May Make May 1st start of General Strike!
TUC must act to support striking nurses and junior doctors!
Trade unions must strike to support Palestine & boycott Israel!
Kick out Tories now!
For world socialist revolution! Assemble:
12 noon,...
A MARKING and assessment boycott yesterday hit 145 UK universities as university staff are refusing to mark and assess work. The UCU lecturers’ union has condemned the employers’ threats to deduct 100% of staff wages. The boycott was launched after employers failed to produce an improved offer in the pay and...
ON Monday, Ernest Moret, who works at the Paris based publisher Editions La Fabrique, was stopped by Metropolitan Police officers after travelling to London on Eurostar. Moret was on his way to attend the London Book Fair when he was stopped and detained under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act...
ISLAMIC Jihad, the Palestinian resistance movement has held the Israeli regime fully responsible for any harm to its high-profile official Sheikh Khader Adnan, who has been on hunger strike for more than 70 days in protest at his detention, warning of a harsh response if he loses his life. Khaled...
MORE Unite ambulance workers have decided to take part in industrial action on Tuesday May 2nd. Unite said yesterday that members at South Central, South East Coast and West Midlands ambulance trusts alongside workers at Christies NHS Foundation Trust, Christies Pathology Partnership, East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust and Sandwell and...
SOARING prices for bread, cereal and chocolate meant the cost of living rose more than expected last month – these are the fruits of the US-UK decision to promote a war against Russia in the Ukraine! Inflation, which measures the rate of price rises, fell to 10.1% in the year...
THE UK’s ‘hostile environment’ means that its compensation scheme is failing Windrush victims, says a Human Rights Watch report published on Monday. HWR said: The UK government scheme to compensate Windrush scandal victims is failing and violating the rights of many to an effective remedy for human rights abuses they...
THE CLAIM that last week 196,000 hospital appointments were cancelled has been used by the Tories and their supporters in the media to put the blame for the NHS crisis on the backs of junior doctors taking four days of strike action last week. On Monday, Tory Health Secretary Steve...
WHILE Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures claimed yesterday that ‘real pay’ has fallen by just 2.3% in the last three months, a Which? report came closer to the truth by revealing that food prices have nearly doubled in a year. The cost of food staples such as cheddar cheese,...
A REPORT compiled by Unearthed, the investigative unit of the Greenpeace environmentalist organisation, and the independent journalist organisation Lighthouse Reports has thrown a light on the massive profits being made and the role of international speculators in driving world food prices into the stratosphere. Their findings, reported in the Guardian...
‘From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free!’ chanted thousands of protesters marching in London from the Home Office to a rally near Downing Street on Sunday to protest against the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestine. The annual Al-Quds Day rally was taking place as one of the...
LONDON'S Guys and St Thomas’ NHS Trust and Yorkshire Ambulance Service NHS Trust will be the first to walk out in new wave of Unite NHS strikes in England, the union Unite said yesterday. Unite’s consultative ballot in England on the government’s NHS offer ends on 28th April. So far, the...
‘WE WILL absolutely not pause our strike action,’ Royal College of Nursing (RCN) General Secretary Pat Cullen said yesterday morning on the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg show when urged to call off the 48-hour national May Day strike that the nurses’ union announced last Friday. ‘Our members have spoken loud and...
THE National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) will march on Wednesday, April 19th to President Cyril Ramaphosa’s office to protest against security companies who have refused to pay the wages of their workers. NUMSA intervened when members employed at airports in Kimberley, Upington and Bloemfontein were not paid...
NURSES will ‘absolutely not’ pause a 48-hour strike in England on May 1st, said the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) yesterday – and it warned that the action could continue until Christmas! RCN leader Pat Cullen told BBC One’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg the government needs to put more money...
TORY Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has been in Washington this week attending the spring meeting of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The IMF, the main economic guardian of the capitalist world, has spent all week agonising over a historic world economic crisis which includes the collapse of major banks in the...
UNISON has reaffirmed its commitment to the One Team campaign for the health service, in the face of the government’s ‘divisive’ actions during the NHS pay dispute, the union’s national executive council (NEC) heard on Wednesday. Health members in England have been voting on the government’s latest pay offer. The...
THE ROYAL College of Nursing (RCN) has announced a round-the-clock 48-hour strike from 8pm on Sunday 30th April to 8pm on Tuesday 2nd May, meaning that there is a national nurses strike on May Day, Monday 1st May. Nurses decisively rejected the derisory 5% Tory pay offer to nurses in...
THERE was a very lively picket line at UCL Hospital yesterday in London’s Euston Road, with over 40 junior doctors waving placards, chanting and singing, backed up by a sound system. Jo Simpson, trainee anaesthetist said: ‘We are here because the pay and conditions of doctors and all of our...
IN THE midst of the historic four days of strike action by junior doctors this week, the leadership of the BMA have resorted to appealing to the Tories to ‘come round the table’ at the conciliation service ACAS to broker some compromise over pay. BMA council chairman, Professor Philip Banfield...
FRENCH President Emmanuel Macron is facing the biggest challenge of his second term over his flagship pension overhaul, which includes raising the retirement age from 62 to 64 and demanding people work longer for a full pay-out. Macron has faced a series of protests and strikes in France against the...
ANGRY NHS workers on strike outside Barnsley hospital in South Yorkshire spoke to News Line yesterday. Ellen Newberry, deputy chair of Junior Doctors Committee (BMA), warned: ‘Our pay has been cut by 26% in the last 15 years, and our first-year doctors are now only earning £14 per hour ‘We’re not...