Lead story

Tories plotting to ditch Cameron?

by Daphne Liddle

BACKBENCH Tory MP Andrew Bridgen last week warned that David Cameron’s Remain campaign to sway the European Referendum has been so dishonest and insulting that a growing number of his colleagues want to see Cameron sacked as leader of the Tory party and a general election before Christmas — whatever the outcome of the referendum.

“Whatever the result, I believe his position will be untenable” said Bridgen, who chairs a Commons select committee. “David Cameron has placed himself front and centre of a disingenuous Remain campaign, setting himself at odds with half of the Parliamentary Party and 70 per cent of our members and activists on the most important issue facing our Country in a generation,” Bridgen said.

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Tories plotting to ditch Cameron?

Wales to defy Tory Trade Union Bill

by New Worker correspondent

MARK DRAKEFORD, the Welsh Assembly Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Local Government, attacked the Tory Trade Union Bill while he was speaking at the Welsh TUC Conference in Llandudno last week. He promised that they would repeal every “pernicious, illiberal and regressive section”.

He claimed that although some changes had already been achieved by the campaign led by the trade unions, some parts of the Bill, “fundamentally harmful to Wales”, were still there.

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Wales to defy Tory Trade Union Bill

Editorial

French workers fight back

Hundreds of thousands of French workers have taken to the streets this week in support of a wave of strikes against draconian new labour laws that the class-collaborationist “Socialist” government wants to impose, which will make them work longer and make it easier for the bosses to sack them. Oil refineries and power stations have been shut down. Public transport is paralysed and road blocks have cut off refineries, ports and industrial complexes. Now the resistance is spreading to Belgium, which was rocked by anti-cuts strikes this week.

For the past two months workers and students have been fighting to block the scrapping of France’s Labour Code and its replacement with an employers’ charter that would end the 35 hour week, cut wages, lengthen the working week and undermine job security.

The new laws will not just drive down workers’ living standards, it will also threaten their health. “Workers will find themselves at the beck and call of their employers, with working hours no longer being defined by contract but instead by the employer,” Alexandra Soumeire of the French lawyers’ union (SAF) said. “Variation of working hours will impose an alternation between periods of long working hours with periods of shorter working hours, but without paying for the extra hours worked.”

At the moment daily working hours are limited to 10 hours and cannot exceed 12 hours except under certain specific circumstances prescribed by law. With the new bill, working in excess of these hours will be permissible — for any reason in connection with the organisation of the company — by collective agreement.

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French workers fight back