Monthly Archives: April 2023
ON THE FIRST day of the four-day strike by 47,600 junior doctors they held a mass rally in central London. From 2pm onwards Trafalgar Square filled up with junior doctors wearing orange BMA hats and waving placards. One handwritten placard read: ‘An apple a day is not the only thing keeping...
THE DAILY Telegraph yesterday called to ‘Combat strikes with contingency plans’ after observing that ‘What has been billed as a Winter of Discontent in the public sector has moved into Spring with no sign of a let-up.’ It observes that ‘Junior Doctors are in the middle of a 96-hour stoppage,...
News Line spoke to two of the junior doctors on the picket line outside Cheltenham Royal Infirmary in Gloucestershire. Dr Chad Harker, BMA rep, said: ‘Hopefully this action will lead to negotiations with the Health Secretary. ‘I imagine if negotiations don’t work it will be up to the leadership to decide...
THE INTERNATIONAL Monetary Fund (IMF) made a wildly optimistic prediction yesterday that soaring UK inflation would become nothing more than a historical blip in the very near future. Once inflation has magically disappeared, the IMF predicts that the era of the Bank of England pushing up interest rates will also...
THERE was massive support for the hundreds of picket lines outside hospitals all around the country yesterday morning as 47,600 junior doctors began their 96-hour strike at 7am. Thousands of junior doctors gathered for a rally in Trafalgar Square, from where they embarked on a march to Downing Street, chanting...
JUNIOR Doctors start their continuous four-day 96-hour strike at 06.59 today, Tuesday 11 April, and end it at 06.59 on Saturday 15 April. Backed by the Council of the British Medical Association (BMA), they are demanding (i) pay restoration by 26 % to bring them back to the level of...
TODAY is the first of four days of strike action by junior doctors throughout the health service in England, in what is the biggest walkout by medics in the 75 years of the NHS. In the strike ballot, conducted in February, 98% of eligible BMA members backed strike action on...
TENS of thousands of junior doctors begin a four-day strike over a 26% erosion in their real-terms pay over the past 15 years, at 6.59am today, running until 6.59am on Saturday. In the days leading up to this biggest-ever strike action by junior doctors, their BMA leaders repeatedly declared that...
THE secretary general of Lebanon’s Hezbollah resistance movement has met with a delegation of senior Hamas officials in Beirut, as tensions explode across the occupied Palestinian territories after Israeli forces violently stormed the al-Aqsa Mosque compound and attacked Palestinian worshippers. Sayyed Nasrallah has met with leaders from the Gaza-based resistance...
JERUSALEM – Early on Friday, the Israeli military’s press service confirmed that the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) launched a rocket strike on the Gaza Strip in response to recent rocket fire from the coastal enclave. The retaliatory rockets came after incidents at the al-Aqsa Mosque’s compound in occupied East Jerusalem, where...
JUNIOR doctors in England have told the Health Secretary, Steve Barclay, that a credible offer – showing he is serious about pay restoration and willing to negotiate in a timely manner to resolve 15 years of pay erosion – could stop the forthcoming strike action. In reply to a letter...
‘URGENT Motion 2 Palestine’ was carried at the Annual Conference of the National Education Union (NEU) in Harrogate on Tuesday. It read: ‘Conference continues to stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people. We support their right to self-determination and call for the end of the occupation of the West Bank and...
THE newly installed Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, yesterday stated that the Met faced its biggest corruption crisis since the 1970s. The crisis, that Rowley has been drafted in to try and head off, exploded with the kidnapping, rape and murder of Sarah Everard in 2021 by Wayne Couzens...
THE NAHT school head teachers union executive has announced that it will move to a formal industrial action ballot after a 90% membership vote against accepting the Tory government’s miserable pay offer. The National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) has become the third union to formally reject the offer. The union...
ISRAELI police yesterday morning and since Tuesday night restricted entry of Muslim worshippers into Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem’s Old City, a site Muslims seek to hold all day and night prayer vigils during the holy fast month of Ramadan, in order to secure entry of Jewish fanatics into the...
LEADING employment lawyers are to issue yet another warning that the Tory government’s new Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill will give ministers ‘unfettered power’ to restrict the right to strike. In a joint statement, the legal specialists are to say the new legislation will make Britain ‘an outlier’ on strike...
THE NATIONAL Education Union (NEU) consultative ballot on the government’s pay offer has been rejected by an overwhelming 98% of members in England on a turnout of 66%, delegates at the Union’s annual conference in Harrogate were informed to rapturous applause on Monday morning. It was announced that 191,319 serving...
YESTERDAY Finland formally joined NATO, becoming the 31st member of the US-led imperialist military bloc in what NATO Secretary-General, Jens Stoltenberg, described as ‘The fastest ratification process in NATO’s modern history’. The process would have been even faster but for one NATO member, Turkey, initially refusing to ratify Finland’s membership. Once...
FRAIL and vulnerable people will go without the care they need, the union Unison warned yesterday, after the Tories slashed social care funding by another £250 million. A total of £600m has now been slashed by the Department of Health and Social Care.
One in 10 posts are vacant, with staffing...
A GENERAL STRIKE has been held across towns and cities in the occupied Palestinian territories following the Israeli regime’s killing of a Palestinian youth near the al-Aqsa Mosque compound in the occupied Old City of Jerusalem on the second Friday of the holy fasting month of Ramadan. Palestinian media said...
At its annual conference yesterday, the leaders of the National Education Union (NEU) reported that the latest Tory pay offer was rejected by an overwhelming 98% of its members in a turnout of 66%. 191,000 teachers in England rejected an ‘insulting’ pay offer of a £1,000 one-off payment and a...
TEACHERS have voted by a massive 98% in favour of strike action to defeat the Tories’ miserable 4.3% pay offer. Commenting on the ballot result yesterday, Dr Mary Bousted and Kevin Courtney, Joint General Secretaries of the National Education Union (NEU), said: ‘The offer shows an astounding lack of judgement...
‘WE'VE won every dispute at Heathrow in recent years and we’ll win this one,’ local Hayes and Harlington Labour MP John McDonnell said when he visited 1,400 Terminal 5 security workers on their mass picket line on Saturday morning. The security workers are holding a 10-day strike, joining other civil...
Many flights operating out of French airports like Paris-Orly, Toulouse, Nantes were cancelled over the weekend due to ongoing strike action by air traffic controllers. France’s civil aviation authority, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), announced last week that it had asked airlines to cancel scores of flights at...
PM Sunak’s new anti-trade union legislation will make the UK one of the most difficult countries in the world to go on strike, a group of top employment lawyers have said. Ten academic experts in employment law said the enforcement of ‘minimum service levels’ in sectors such as health, transport...
THE strike wave is spreading throughout Europe! In France workers are making it crystal clear that they will never allow the increases in the retirement age that Macron is desperate to introduce for the benefit of the French bosses. The French workers are more than capable of deciding to bring down...
CHINA has hailed the recent joint naval drills with Russia and Iran in the Sea of Oman, saying the exercises boosted the ability of their navies to conduct diversified maritime missions. Tan Kefei, a spokesman at the Chinese defence ministry, made the remarks at a press conference on Thursday, saying...
AT SOUTHWARK Crown Court this week, a protester represented by Bindmans LLP has been found not guilty by a unanimous jury in a trial following from the Black Lives Matter demonstrations that took place in London in June 2020. As a long-time advocate for racial justice, the defendant had attended...