National News
Transport battles
by New Worker correspondent
MONDAY morning saw the start of a month of planned strikes by baggage handlers at London’s Heathrow Airport.
This action will continue until midnight on Monday 9th March and will be followed by two further eight-day periods of strike action beginning on Saturday 14th March until Saturday 21st March, and from Thursday 26th March until Thursday 2nd April. There have already been two shorter strikes, at the beginning and end of February.
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Working for free
by New Worker correspondent
A DEMAND for an eight-hour day was a common demand of 19th-century radicals on both sides of the Atlantic. American workers formulated the slogan “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, and eight hours for what we will”. Centuries earlier King Alfred had a similar but more pious ideal of eight hours work, eight hours rest and eight hours of study.
Last Friday was the TUC’s 16th annual ‘Work Your Proper Hours Day’. This marked the date on which workers who have been working for free due to unpaid overtime start earning for themselves.
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Housing benefit fraud
by New Worker correspondent
THE CASE of a small housing development in north London illustrates an aspect of the housing crisis in Britain.
The former fire-station (opened in 1915 and closed in 2014 by Bois Johnson as Mayor of London) in Belsize Park is being converted into 20 one, two and four bedroom “luxury apartments with its Arts and Crafts period architecture, preserved with meticulous attention to detail throughout to create thoughtful and luxuriously contemporary designed homes”. That means they are a snip for £700,000–£1,750,000.
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Priti Patel under pressure to quit
Sputnik
PRITI PATEL, the Home Secretary, has come under increased pressure to resign in the wake of fresh claims that she was prone to mistreating and bullying her staff. New developments came hours after the Cabinet Office launched a formal inquiry into Priti Patel after she was accused of “lying and bullying” by her department’s top civil servant.
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Budget News
by our Scottish political affairs correspondent
THE Scottish Budget has been all but formally passed but the backbiting about it continues relentlessly. As a reward for successfully reading out the Budget drafted by disgraced former Finance Secretary Derek Mackay his former underling Kate Forbes has been promoted to fill his shoes. As the SNP are a minority administration her first task was to win a majority for the Budget. Predictably the Greens came to her aid.
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Broadcasting News
by our Scottish political affairs correspondent
Last week we dealt with the dire viewing figures for the one-year-old BBC Scotland TV channel whose flagship programme has one per cent of the audience. The SNP have the perfect answer for its dire viewing figures, which are paralleled by the Gaelic channel. This is to triple their money.
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2021 Election News
by our Scottish political affairs correspondent
Scottish politics seem to be going down the American road where electioneering is in a constant cycle. While two figures are battling to become MSPs others have given up the ghost. Several have announced they are packing it in at the next election. Most are of pension age, but a one term MSP is giving up because she finds it too much like hard work. Gail Ross has discovered that representing the Highlands in Edinburgh involves too much travel for a 42 year-old.
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Church Notes
by our Scottish political affairs correspondent
In a remarkable display of even handedness the Free Presbyterian Magazine for February has attacked both Boris Johnson and a leading Scottish nationalist.First Boris Johnson: “The Prime Minister himself, in his own life, demonstrates how far the British people have departed from the morality and principles of the Word of God” thunders the Rev’d A W McCall of Dingwall, who goes on to deplore the fact that “He is the first Premier to live openly in 10 Downing Street in the sin of fornication with an unmarried woman he has taken to be his “partner”. At least this situation will improve shortly, nevertheless McCall fears that this “evil example by those in positions of authority will bring the same kind of divine retribution on our beloved nation that came upon the civilisation of imperial Rome, so admired by our Prime Minister”.
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Remembering Stalingrad in St Albans
by New Worker correspondent
THE DEFEAT of the Nazi legions at Stalingrad in February 1943 marked the beginning of the Soviet offensive that ended with Hitler dead in his bunker and the Red Flag flying over Berlin in 1945. The turning point in the Second World War was an immense boost for morale in the anti-fascist resistance throughout occupied Europe and to the people on the British “home front” who had suffered the wrath of the Luftwaffe and faced continuing U-boat blockade. Now almost past living memory, the memory of those distant days has been recalled this week in a St Albans’ exhibition that looks at the Soviet victory and its impact on the cathedral city and the nearby Hertfordshire villages.
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MH17 Call for Justice!
By New Worker correspondent
IN JULY 2014 a Malaysian airliner was shot down over eastern Ukraine during the fighting between the Donbas partisans and the fascist militias loyal to the US puppet regime in Kiev.
Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) was a scheduled passenger flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur and all 283 passengers and 15 crew were killed. A Dutch-led investigation said the plane had been downed by a missile fired by the Donbas resistance or the Russians – a claim that the imperialist media has unquestioningly repeated in its efforts to demonise Russia and the anti-fascist Ukrainian resistance movements.
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International News
Americans make peace with Taliban
by Ed Newman
IRAN’S Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has said the US is leaving Afghanistan after two decades of “humiliation” following a so-called peace deal between the Taliban and the United States.
“The US occupiers should’ve never invaded Afghanistan. But they did, and blamed everyone else for consequences,” Zarif said on Sunday. “Now after 19 years of humiliation, the US has tendered its surrender.”
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Gap between rich and poor in US laid bare in face of virus
by Li Qingqing
CORONAVIRUS (COVID-19) is spreading worldwide, and many countries are facing a big test of their governance systems and ability. The US is also facing the threat of the epidemic, and the most worrying situation in the country is that of the poor. The epidemic shows the world the widening gap between the rich and poor in the USA.
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Israel election: Joint List Alliance achieves historic gain
CP Israel
FAR-RIGHT Likud leader and acting Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, appeared poised for an electoral victory on Tuesday though questions remained over whether he had enough support to form a coalition, as votes were still being counted following Monday’s general election, the third in the last 11 months.
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Coronavirus: China’s supercharged conventional epidemic control
by Prabir Purkayastha
THE CORONAVIRUS or COVID-19 epidemic appears to be under control in China, but could create new epicentres in south Korea, Italy and Iran. If this happens and creates multiple countries acting as new centres of the epidemic, we could be moving towards a pandemic.
South Korea saw 214 new infections on 24th February, although reports indicate a sharp drop in new infections. Northern Italy is now under lock-down and has emerged as another centre of the epidemic, with people returning from Italy spreading the infections to other countries. On 24th February, Italy reported more than 100 new cases, although the figures for the 25th claim a rapid drop. Even though numbers in Iran are reported to be under 100, the news that the deputy health minister is himself one of those infected has prompted fears that the numbers could be much higher than detected.
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Features
Hosni Mubarak the US’s dispensable Egyptian ally
by Neil Clark
THE DEATH of the former Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak serves as a reminder that the USA will ruthlessly discard old allies if they no longer serve the Empire’s geopolitical interests.
‘American-backed dictator’ is how a lot of people will view Hosni Mubarak, the deposed former leader of Egypt who has died aged 91.
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The capitalist and colonialist roots of white supremacy
by Joel Wendland-Liu
The World and Africa: Inquiry Into the Part Which Africa Has Played in World History by WEB Du Bois. International Publishers Co Inc, USA; first published 1947, republished in 1965 and 1987.
Paperback: 352 pages; ISBN-10: 0717802213; ISBN-13: 978-0717802210.
WEB Du Bois (1868–1963) was an American socialist and civil rights campaigner who joined the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) in 1961.
IN HIS extraordinary, if neglected, book The World and Africa, WEB Du Bois details a history of Africa before European exploration, the enslavement of tens of millions and the imposition of colonialism. In so doing, he assembles a compendium of the continent’s contributions to human development, its role in shaping the histories of Europe and Asia, as well as the diversity of its languages, cultures and peoples.
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Scare mongers ignore the facts to fit their “evil China” narrative
by Curtis Stone
ON 10th February the New York Times published an article titled Coronavirus Outbreak Risks Reviving Stigma for China. The gist of it is that we should not blame China for epidemics, such as the current outbreak of coronavirus disease. The article also points to the problem of outdated perceptions, noting that US President Donald Trump’s top trade advisor, Peter Navarro, once described China as a “disease incubator”, a comment that even the New York Times admitted went too far.
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