National News
Transport battles
by New Worker correspondent
TRANSPORT workers are presently in the vanguard of industrial action. One group of workers began the year by securing victory in a long-standing pay dispute. These were the air traffic controllers at Highlands and Islands Airports Limited (HIAL), whose dispute has now been resolved when members of Prospect union voted to accept a revised pay offer from the SNP-government company.
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Parasites on the NHS
by New Worker correspondent
SIMPLY because the north London ‘Whittington Hospital NHS Trust’ withdrew from negotiations over a 10-year “strategic estates partnership” it is being sued for £14 million damages by the aggrieved potential contractor.
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Rubbishy conditions
by New Worker correspondent
ONE GROUP of workers who will not feature in the High Pay List are the bin collectors in the Midlands borough of Sandwell who have voted for industrial action after their bosses, the notorious outsourcing company Serco, urged workers to ignore the company’s own safety rules. A recent ballot saw GMB members vote to take action short of strike, in this case a work to rule.
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Scottish Political News
by our Scottish political affairs correspondent
AS MIGHT BE expected, the holiday season was more than unusually quiet politically as everyone involved in politics seemed to have collapsed with exhaustion.
There were some minor skirmishes however, over the discovery that Education Secretary John Swinney was concerned enough to order his officials to undertaken an investigation into falling school examination pass rates at the same time as he was saying publicly that the poor results were simply “annual variation”.
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wrath
by our Scottish political affairs correspondent
The Scottish National Party (SNP) incurred the wrath of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) after it sent out instructions to journalists on how to interview Tory spokespersons, saying that they should “not accept their assertions and move on. Boris Johnson and the Tories’ undemocratic and untenable position should be rigorously scrutinised”.
In response,
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Slow Progress
by our Scottish political affairs correspondent
In 2015 The SNP launched the “Scottish Business Pledge”, which involved firms promising to pay the so-called living wage, abolish zero-hours contracts and encourage gender balance. Nearly five years on the results are clear. Out of 356,550 private sector companies a magnificent 650 have signed up, and that was announced in July. This is a 0.18 per cent uptake for what was a flagship SNP policy designed to show how much they cared about the working classes.
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Normal Service Resumes
by our Scottish political affairs correspondent
Normal service is resuming however. Election post mortems are taking place and the ground is being laid for future battles.
The Scottish Tories will finally be having a belated leadership contest to replace Ruth Davidson, who resigned a political æon ago in late August. Already one female MSP, Michelle Ballantyne, whom nobody has ever heard of, has thrown her hat in the ring to prevent the acting leader Jackson Carlaw having an uncontested coronation. It is to be hoped that Tory constitutional affairs spokesman Adam Tompkins will stand and win so that we can all enjoy the spectacle of him regularly reminding the first Minister that she was once one of his less inspiring law students at Glasgow University.
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Stop Trump’s war with Iran
by New Worker correspondent
HUNDREDS of demonstrators rallied in Whitehall on Saturday to protest against the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, the top Iranian general killed in a targeted US drone attack in Baghdad last week. Left-wing Labour frontbenchers John McDonnell and Richard Burgon joined the Stop the War protesters demonstrating over the deadly attack that the Iranians have sworn to avenge in the very near future. McDonnell warned that the killing would “set the Middle East and the globe alight yet again”, and urged protesters to take direct action “on the streets in demonstrations and actions”.
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by Carole Barclay
CLAPHAM Junction is the final destination for comrades coming by rail to the Party Centre. A train departs every 30 seconds and about 110 trains per hour pass through the station throughout the day. Said to be the busiest station in the world, it heaves with commuters during the rush-hour. And some will stop and stare at the dedication to Oscar Wilde on Platform 10 that recalls the humiliation suffered by the famous Victorian playwright on that very spot in November 1895.
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An Indian spotlight on the communist world
REVIEW
by Robin McGregor
REVOLUTIONARY DEMOCRACY, Vol XXV, No 1, October 2019. £5.00 + £1.50 p&p from NCP Lit: PO Box 73, London SW11 2PQ.
THIS twice yearly Indian Marxist-Leninist journal has caught up with its publication schedule, with the October issue now available.
As is the custom, the first section is devoted to contemporary India. It begins with an article with the self-explanatory title of Obituary of a Liberal Democracy: Ushering in Hindu Rashtra. This is a depressing survey of the widespread electoral triumph of the incumbent Hindu-fascist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) alliance, which won 353 seats out of the 545 seats in the Lok Sabha in the 2019 parliamentary elections. Following are two pieces that confirm the malign effects of BJP rule on India. The first is an account of the state of the Indian rural population, from figures provided by the official Indian statistical body (a second article on the urban working class will follow). In many respects the already low living standards in the countryside (where 72 per cent of the labour force live) are showing signs of decline. The second deplores the BJP’s recent budget, which falls far short of its election promises and is obsessed with attracting foreign investment.
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Star Wars — the final chapter
by Ben Soton
Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker (2019), 12A, 144mins, on general release.
Director: JJ Abrams. Writers: Chris Terrio, JJ Abrams, Derek Connolly and Colin Trevorrow; based on characters created by George Lucas. Staring: Carrie fisher, Mark Hamill, Adam Driver and Daisy Ridley.
IN WHAT is set to be the last in the 42-year-long series of films, I have to say there was something missing. Was it really what fans of the franchise have been waiting for? Perhaps the problem was there was just too much going on in the story. We see key characters die and come alive again, whilst we see the return of long-dead villains, and the age-old conflict between the Jedi and the Sith appears to be resolved. I almost laughed out loud when Rey, played by Daisy Ridley, walks through the remains of the Death Star destroyed at the end of the first film.
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International News
Trump celebrates new decade by trying to start WW III
by William Rivers Pitt
I HAVE maintained a straightforward core operating principle for the last 20 years: If John Bolton is happy, we are all in deep trouble. The assassination on Thursday of Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani on the orders of Donald Trump has made Bolton — a bloodthirsty neocon war-hawk whose lust for war in Iran is bottomless — a very happy man.
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Netanyahu asks for immunity
CP Israel
ISRAEL’S far-right Prime Minister for the last decade, Benjamin Netanyahu, requested immunity from the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, on 1st January, from prosecution in three corruption cases in which he faces indictment on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust. Netanyahu made the request in a nationally televised appearance four hours before a midnight deadline, defending his request as protection from what he termed are “trumped-up charges”.
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Chinese netizens welcome Thunberg
Global Times
CHINESE netizens want Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg, if she ever comes to the country, to go to north-west China to gain a better understanding of how Chinese people combat desertification effectively in real life. And she might as well help plant some trees there herself.
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America’s lawless arrogance
by finian Cunningham
AMERICA’S lawless arrogance has gone too far with the assassination of Iran’s top military commander last week. The deadly air-strike against General Qasem Soleimani was carried out on the order of President Donald Trump.
Several other senior Iranian military officials were also killed in the US missile attack on Iraq’s international airport in the capital Baghdad, including a top Iraqi militia leader.
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Features
It never happened!
Why Labour’s great 2017 vote is being airbrushed out of history
by Neil Clark
THE DOMINANT ‘centrist’ narrative following Labour’s crushing election defeat in December is that the party was simply ‘unelectable’ under the ‘extremist’ Jeremy Corbyn. Yet just two years ago, Labour, under the very same Jeremy Corbyn, saw its biggest rise in popularity since the Second World War and was EIGHT points clear of the Tories in the polls.
“It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.”
The late Harold Pinter uttered the above words in his video-taped 2005 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, apropos of the non-reporting of US war crimes. You could say they apply too to the 2017 general election and the terrific performance of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party.
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Rawa remains resilient
by Reem Haddad
PETITE and demure Rawa wears a strict hijab. She looks like a typical Syrian woman — but she isn’t. Hiding behind the calm exterior there are nightmarish memories that almost bring her heart to a stop — particularly around this time of year, for this is when it happened, six years ago!
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‘Foreign forced labour’ - another fake story to slander China
Global Times
LAST MONTH the British media suddenly broke the news saying that a six-year-old girl from south London had found a message for help from a Shanghai prisoner in a box of Christmas cards. The person who left the message said they were a group of foreigners in Shanghai Qingpu Prison who were forced to work against their will. They demanded help by notifying human rights organisations and contacting Peter Humphrey [a British journalist jailed in China in 2014 for trafficking personal data].
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