Tag: local government

Welfare ‘reform’ plans aimed at privatising ‘help’ for the long term unemployed drew an angry response from civil servants’ union PCS yesterday. Union leader Mark Serwotka...

THE working class is rising up to defend the Welfare State. On Saturday, hundreds of thousands of workers and members of the public took...

‘WE are going to fight to keep our hospitals, even if it means occupying them to keep them open,’ shouted demonstrators fighting plans to...

‘THE mass picket has gone very well,’ said Bill Rogers, secretary of the North East London Council of Action, outside the North Middlesex Hospital...

IMPOSSIBLE fees estimated at £1,500 a year will be imposed in September, if the government is allowed to go ahead with planned cuts in...

The National Union of Teachers says the involvement of private sector companies in education over recent years ‘is of grave concern’. It stresses that the...

HAMAS leader Khaled Mishaal held a news conference in Cairo last Friday. He began by saying: ‘We are now in Cairo on the first leg...

‘THIS is a tremendous demonstration of the anger of the British people against what Blair has done in Iraq and is threatening to do...

OVER 100,000 people marched in London and many thousands more marched in Glasgow on Saturday, to demand the immediate withdrawal of all British troops...

‘The trade union and Labour movement must rise up and oppose Blair’s proposal to ensure Britain becomes the aircraft carrier for Bush’s nuclear ambitions,’...

THE real content of the ‘war against terror’ (a tool for promoting imperialist interests and for grabbing the world’s resources) has been proven with...

International aid agency Oxfam said on Wednesday that conditions in the Occupied Palestinian Territories are close to melt-down. It called on members of the EU,...

RUTH Kelly, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, has backed proposals to end the long-term secure tenancies of working-class families living in...

‘PRIVATE companies are raking in millions of pounds, leaving a black hole in NHS finances,’ UNISON – Britain’s largest health workers’ union – has...

A REPORT into the expenditure of the National Health Service on drugs, published by the government’s Office of Fair Trading (OFT) yesterday, reveals that...

‘The government is allowing multinationals to bleed the NHS dry,’ public sector union UNISON general secretary, Dave Prentis, said yesterday. Private companies are raking in...

AHEAD of next Monday’s summit in Jerusalem, President George Bush’s administration is setting out to wreck the agreement reached in Mecca on February 8...

The Communication Workers Union (CWU) yesterday announced a week of action against the closure of Post Offices. The week of campaigning by the ‘Future for...

THE Iraqi Association of Muslim Scholars has issued a statement on the US’ Baghdad security plan. It said that under the plan: ‘First, most...

Hamas Political Bureau chief Khaled Mishaal in an extensive interview last Tuesday reflected on the Mecca agreement between the Hamas and Fatah movements. Mishaal said:...

MORE than 15,000 students marched through Athens last Thursday demanding the withdrawal of the proposed revision of Article 16 of the Constitution, which would...

MORE than 400 Chagos Islanders and their supporters marched through Crawley town centre on Saturday, shouting: ‘We will return to Diego Garcia – it’s...

Chagos Islanders are at the High Court in London today, where the British government is making a second appeal against the ruling that they...

Over 2,000 workers and youth last Saturday marched through Leyton and Walthamstow, north east London, against the closure of Whipps Cross Hospital. The march was...

‘Paramedics don’t have referral skills. ‘Andy Burnham is not redefining the health service and Patricia Hewitt got her facts wrong last year when she...

PRIME Minister Blair has been secretly questioned, for a second time, by police investigating allegations that honours were sold for cash by his government....

STRIKING PCS members in Harrow, north-west London, staged pickets at the Land Registry, the local Jobcentre, Harrow Magistrates and Harrow Crown Court from early...

PALESTINIAN Prime Minister Ismail Haniya on Sunday called on President Mahmud Abbas to adopt a quick decision to withdraw all members of the...

ON Wednesday over 200,000 civil servants and over 200 government departments will be strike bound for the day. Civil servants...

HEALTH chiefs on the Barnet, Enfield and Haringey Clinical Strategy Board, yesterday denied that the decision has already been taken to shut the A&E...

OVER 200 local residents, hospital workers, pensioners, community workers, trade unionists and others opposed to the closure of the Maudsley Hospital Emergency Clinic staged...

TRADE unionists from across the public sector spoke out on Tuesday, demanding action from the TUC to stop the privatisation of the NHS and...

TRADE unionists, youth and local NHS campaigners voted unanimously at a meeting on Thursday night ‘to establish the North East London Council of Action’. The...

LAKSHMI Mittal, the Indian-born billionaire has donated £2m to the Labour Party, it was revealed yesterday. The fifth richest man in the world, who owns...

THE UK inflation rate has leapt to an 11-year high of three per cent according to the government’s Consumer Prices Index (CPI) which grossly...

US Secretary of State Rice’s visit to the Middle East is to organise the conditions for US attacks on both Iran and...

A packed 400-strong Save Chase Farm meeting in Enfield last Saturday heard calls for Councils of Action to organise occupations to stop the closure...

‘This is a damning indictment of a social care system that is failing older people’, Age Concern’s Director General, Gordon Lishman, said on Wednesday. He...

‘WE HAVE one year to save the National Health Service (NHS). An awful lot of Trusts are in a dire financial state.’ This was a...

THE just-published ‘State of Social Care’ report from the Commission for Social Care Inspection (CSCI) was greeted as ‘a damning indictment of a...

‘This is a damning indictment of a social care system that is failing older people’, Age Concern’s Director General, Gordon Lishman said yesterday. He was...

IRANIAN President Mahmud Ahmadinezhad spoke to a gathering of the people of Ramshir in oil-rich Khuzestan Province, which has a large Arab population...

AMONG the towns and cities where Iraqis have been marching in funeral processions to honour President Saddam Hussein is Al Dujail. This is where the...

Youth unemployment is now higher than it was in 1997, with 702,000 young people aged 16-24 jobless, according to official figures released just before...

FOUR YEARS after the first Tube assets were handed to the private sector, London Underground’s biggest union has called for the disastrous ‘Public-Private Partnership’...