Tag: housing

Chancellor Darling is set to announce a 2.5 per cent cut in Value Added Tax (VAT) from 17.5 per cent to 15 per cent...

‘We continue to believe that stock transfer is fraught with financial hazards,’ Unite said yesterday after it was announced that Plymouth council tenants have...

FACED with the crash of the pound and the enormous 182,000 leap in the number of unemployed in the three months to October, the...

‘The newly unemployed face a bigger cut in their living standards in this recession than those who lost their jobs under the previous government’,...

FOR SOME time Labour has been promoting the theme that the very idea of a job for life is reactionary, and has been glorifying...

CONSTRUCTION union UCATT has labelled proposals by the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH), to end secure tenancies and all other current council tenancies in...

‘STOP evictions from Heygate estate!’ demanded a picket by Heygate tenants and the South-East London Council of Action, outside Southwark Town Hall last Wednesday...

The Unite trade union yesterday urged Lloyds TSB and HBOS ‘to start thinking about the human consequences of this takeover’. It was responding to...

‘Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is like a poster girl promoting migration of Filipinos in the name of dollar remittances, at the expense of the poor’, the...

THE world’s banks have now lost £1.8 trillion the Bank of England has reported in its Financial Stability Report. This is as a result of...

OVER 150 Chagos Islanders and their supporters – including a delegation of Chagossians who had flown from Mauritius – were at the House of...

‘HEYGATE estate – not for sale!’, ‘Keep council housing!’, ‘Regeneration bullies – out!’ Those were the chants of more than 20 tenants and trade unionists...

Hundreds of thousands of civil servants, members of the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS), have voted overwhelmingly for strike action over pay. A PCS...

The number of UK unemployed rose by 164,000 between June and August, to 1.79 million, taking the official unemployment rate to 5.7% from...

The number of unemployed people in the UK rose by another 164,000 between June and August, to 1.79 million, according to the latest government...

Councils will have to make further savings as the economic slowdown bites, local government bosses warned on Friday. The economic slowdown has left town halls...

BOTH Wall Street and the London stock markets made record advances yesterday. The FTSE 100 index rocketed upwards on Friday morning adding £80billion to share...

QUEUES formed around the Singapore offices of an AIG subsidiary yesterday, as the world’s biggest insurance company collapsed, losing 70% of its share price. At...

By Irish political journalist JOHN COULTER STORMONT stands on the brink of collapse – a political dilemma the North has not faced since 2002 when...

DELEGATES to the Trades Union Congress (TUC) yesterday voted overwhelmingly to demand the re-nationalisation of public utilities, in opposition to the TUC leadership’s ‘reservations’. TUC...

THE Bank of England (BoE) Monetary Policy Committee decided yesterday to make no change in its base interest rate and to leave it at...

THE pound fell to an exchange rate of $1.77 yesterday, its lowest level for two-and-a-half years. In June sterling was trading at $2, but...

In a bid to prop up the banks and construction industry, prime minister Brown and chancellor Darling yesterday promoted a £1.6bn housing rescue package. This...

YESTERDAY’S reports on the state of the economy reveal more about the catastrophe gripping British capitalism, part of the world crisis. • The Bank of...

‘We look forward to see what the government’s economic recovery strategy is,’ a TUC spokesman told News Line yesterday. ‘Any measures that ease the pressure...

AVERAGE house prices in Britain are now 10.5 per cent lower than they were a year ago, according to figures published yesterday by Nationwide,...

Sri Lanka Army (SLA) soldiers in their sentry post along Jaffna lagoon found a male corpse with gun shot wounds washed ashore on...

THE new Deputy Governor of the Bank of England (BoE), Charles Bean said yesterday that when the so-called ‘credit crunch’ began last August central...

‘Bailiffs and Bulldozers, is the only way Lewisham Council are going to remove us’, is the motto of the Worried Tenants Group who are...

‘If there is no movement then we will have to look to further action in the near future,’ UNISON Scottish Secretary Matt Smith told...

TAMILNET reports that a fire at Poonthoaddam Refugee Camp in Vavuniyaa town last Wednesday destroyed 80 temporary sheds of internally displaced families. No...

YESTERDAY’S soaring inflation figures led trade union leaders to warn the government that members are demanding action against the wage-cutting three-year pay settlements. The Consumer...

SOUTHWARK Council denied that it had started eviction proceedings yesterday against tenants of the Heygate Estate in Elephant and Castle, south London. A ...

By Irish political journalist JOHN COULTER IRISH republicans must re-negotiate their political relationship with unionists, the president of the North’s largest nationalist party, Sinn Fein,...

LABOUR MP Bob Marshall Andrews, recently called the Labour Foreign Secretary David Miliband a ‘duplicitous traitor’, after Miliband published an article in the Guardian...

THE Northern Rock bank, recently nationalised by the government has made a £585m loss for the first six months of the year, but the...

The government is to inject another £3bn into Northern Rock, Chancellor Darling said yesterday. As the nationalised bank announced a loss of £585.4m in the...

THE HSBC bank has just declared a 28 per cent, $3.9bn fall in half year profits. It has written off another $3.7 billion...

JUST a few months ago the UNISON leadership accepted the government’s below inflation wage cutting deal over three years. Now the union has had...

A THOUSAND people – hospital staff, local residents, trade unionists and other groups from as far away as Crawley and Cambridge – joined the...

AFTER the Labour party defeat at Glasgow East, one of the safest Labour seats in the country, the Prime Minister Gordon Brown has stated...

UNISON has welcomed new research showing the value of trade unions to migrant workers. The report by social policy charity the Rowntree Foundation was launched...

THERE was a lively campaign yesterday, as local people joined in and gave out leaflets for the North East London Council of...

Picket lines were out across the country on Wednesday morning as 800,000 UNISON and Unite council worker members began the first day of a...

TODAY 800,000 local council workers, members of the UNISON and UNITE trade unions, begin a two-day strike against a government-imposed wage cut, an offer...