‘Don’t break Britain’
TRADE unionists and other progressives have kept up a string of events protesting at the coming Con-Dem public spending cuts.
On Tuesday 19th October workers from across the public and private sectors gathered outside the House of Commons and in a rally in Westminster Central Hall to urge the coalition government to think again over plans for swingeing cuts to public services.
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No more help for bad blood victims
ANNE MILTON, Public Health Minister in the Con-Dem government, last week ruled out raising compensation levels for the victims of one of the worst scandals of the NHS.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s the NHS purchased blood for transfusion from the United States without checking its origins. Much of it turned out to be contaminated with HIV and with hepatitis C
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Deportee dies on plane
THREE security guards contracted to work for the UK Border Agency were arrested last week after the death of a young man, Jimmy Mubenga, who was being forcibly repatriated to Angola.
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London firefighters to strike
FIREFIGHTERS in London voted by 79 per cent in a ballot for strike action against management threats of mass sackings to enforce a change of shift patterns. The first two 24-hour strikes are planned for Saturday 23rd October and Monday 1st November.
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New nuclear sites
THE CON-DEM government last week announced that nuclear power has a definite role to play in Britain’s future energy supply.
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Vigil for the Miami Five
by a New Worker correspondent
New Worker supporters and hundreds of other Londoners braved the pouring rain on Tuesday to take part in a candlelit vigil outside the US embassy and demand the release of the Miami Five. TUC leader Brendan Barber, veteran Labour politician Tony Benn and a number of other union leaders joined the daughter of one of the Cuban prisoners in calling for their immediate release during the early evening vigil in Grosvenor Square.
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TUC attacks unfair benefit rulings
THE TUC last Friday revealed new evidence that the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is moving people from Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) to Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA) purely to save money, even though the individuals are not fit enough to return to work.
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Lobbying against anti-union laws
by a New Worker correspondent
TRADE UNIONISTS lobbied Parliament last week to persuade MPs to back a Private Members bill that would prevent employers from using technicalities to block industrial action.
John McDonnell MP has introduced the Bill to prevent employers blocking the democratic wishes of trade union members who have voted overwhelmingly in favour of industrial action. Employers constantly challenge democratic union ballots on minor technical grounds that would have had no affect on the outcome of the ballot. Bosses’ organisations, and the Mayor of London, are now calling for a complete twisting of the basic rules of democracy to tighten the noose even further around workers’ necks.
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Celebrating the Workers’ Party of Korea in London
by a New Worker correspondent
NEW WORKER supporters joined other friends of Democratic Korea in the heart of London last Saturday. Over 30 people from all walks of life including workers, teachers, students and pensioners took part in the celebration of the 65th anniversary of the Workers’ Party of Korea organised by the UK Korean Friendship Association (UK KFA) and the Juche Idea Study Group and supported by the New Communist Party, Second Wave Publications and the south London Morning Star supporters group.
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Mumia focus of anti-death penalty protest
by Monica Moorehead
THE WORLD Day Against the Death Penalty was commemorated on 10th October with a major emphasis on the United States, where more executions take place than any other industrialised country. Since the death penalty was re-instituted by the US Supreme Court in 1976, 1,229 executions have taken place, with 41 in 2010 alone and counting.
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Is Paris burning?
Radio Havana Cuba
THE JOINING of high school students in the current protests in France against pension reforms, which the government of Nicolas Sarkozy plans to impose, has meant an increase in tension in a country that cannot or should not forget the historic days of May 1968, when young people shook the foundations of power.
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Venezuela and Belarus strengthen ties
Radio Havana Cuba
THE PRESIDENT of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, has recently reached an agreement with his Belarusian counterpart, Aleksander Lukashenko, on many areas of cooperation. These areas include housing, the construction of a factory in Venezuela to assemble heavy-goods trucks and an oil supply to the former Soviet republic.
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An inconvenient tour?
Radio Havana Cuba
THE UNITED States and Israel have raised waves of qualifying remarks over last week’s official visit to Lebanon by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was greeted by a crowd in Beirut who offered him rose petals and supported banners and photographs as an expression of gratitude for his help in rebuilding the country devastated by decades of war and Tel Aviv’s repeated attacks.
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A helping hand for Uncle Ho
HOANG Thi Minh Ho, 97, and her husband, the late Trinh Van Bo, housed and cared for President Ho Chi Minh in 1945 while he wrote Vietnam’s Declaration of Independence, she talks to Ta Thu Giang.
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Black History Month
John Brown: courage and clarity that changed history
From Rally, Comrades! (US)
ON SIXTEENTH October 1859, 21 brave revolutionaries launched an attempt to seize the federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, and spark a slave uprising in the United States.
After 36 hours of hard fighting, most of the raiders were killed or captured. The raid failed — in the military and tactical sense. In the moral and strategic sense, it was ultimately a resounding success.
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Russia’s iconic Aurora cruiser publicly disgraced
by Andrei Mikhailov
RECENT media reports caused a real shock in the naval community, not only in Russia but also, no doubt, in many other countries around the world: the legendary crew of Aurora, the ship that fired the first shots in the 1917 Russian Revolution, will be disbanded as early as 1st December 2010. The Aurora will lose the status of a warship and will become a branch of a museum.
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