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The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain


National News

Dickensian housing

by New Worker correspondent

THE CONCEPT of ‘affordable housing’ is a dubious one. Developers frequently announce that they will provide “affordable” houses in a “luxury” block of flats in order to get planning permission from the local council.

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All at sea

by New Worker correspondent

TRANSPORT union RMT is calling on the public to boycott the Dover to Calais ferry service, which has just started being run by the Irish Ferries company.

RMT General Secretary Mick Lynch warned of the dangerous shift patterns being worked on the Cypriot-registered Isle of Inishmore. He said: “Seafarer fatigue remains a threat to safety standards across the shipping industry, despite the progress made since the Herald of Free Enterprise disaster 34 years ago.

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Serco battles

by New Worker correspondent

NOTORIOUS outsourcing company Serco is the target of union action by Unite in three London industrial disputes. In the west London borough of Ealing traffic wardens started two weeks of strike on Wednesday, which Unite the Union says will result in a “parking free for all”.

Since the start of May more than 40 civil enforcement officers have taken strike action off and on in a dispute over Serco’s refusal to negotiate a new absence management policy for employees working on the Ealing contract. Unite suspects that the present policy is being used to unfairly dismiss employees and should be renegotiated. Trade union activists and members are being offered severance in an effort to undermine trade union organisation and collective consultation.

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Scottish Political News

by our Scottish political affairs correspondent

LIKE THE death of Calvin Coolidge, the closure of the Scottish parliament is difficult to tell. Holyrood’s two-month long summer break starts just weeks after it was elected and sworn in. There will, however, be two days when it will sit to allow the First Minister to keep herself in the public eye and also make COVID-19 announcements to remind us of its existence.

The final few days of the brief session of the new parliament were a good week to bury bad news according the Labour’s deputy leader Jackie Baillie, who said: “The SNP has again tried to bury a catalogue of failures in the final days of term.”

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COVID-19 latest

by our Scottish political affairs correspondent

On Monday it was reported that there were 3,285 new cases of COVID‑19 in Scotland, a new record as the previous high was 2,999 on Thursday. Cases requiring hospital care and fatalities have, thankfully, been low.

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Real Election News

by our Scottish political affairs correspondent

There were two council by-elections in Scotland last month, both caused by the deaths of incumbents.

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Russian Ambassador says relations at “zero” after clash

by Ilya Tsukanov

RUSSIAN AMBASSADOR Andrei Kelin says the state of relations between Russia and the UK are at “zero point” following the confrontation with the Royal Navy in the Black Sea last week.

Russian warships and aircraft swarmed over a Royal Navy destroyer after it entered Russian territorial waters off Crimea and proceeded to ignore orders to leave the area immediately. The confrontation included a Russian vessel and a Su-24M jet firing warning shots near the British vessel.

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International News

West wants Myanmar ruled by puppets

by Evgeny Mikhaylov

THE WEST wants to control the people in charge of Myanmar says General Min Aung Hlaing, the commander-in-chief of the country’s armed forces and chair of the State Administration Council. The USA and Britain have imposed sanctions on the Asian nation, and the UN General Assembly adopted a draft resolution calling on all countries to stop selling weapons to Myanmar.

The ambivalent perception of the recent events in Myanmar can be put down to the West’s intention to “destroy our state” the general says. “The second reason is that they want to have in power people who are under their control”.

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Capitalism behind fatal building disasters

by Kathy Durkin

TWO preventable catastrophes caused by capitalist greed in housing construction occurred four years and thousands of miles apart, and in both cases the tragic loss of human life was horrendous. Whilst Florida’s building collapse is affecting a more affluent grouping in the USA, the earlier disaster at the Grenfell Tower in England impacted a lower-income community, many of them immigrants.

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World condemns US blockade

by Jorge Ruiz Miyares

THE international community has once again ratified the UN General Assembly’s rejection of the blockade imposed on Cuba by the US government, which remains isolated in its unilateral efforts.

Last week 184 member states of the UN voted to lift the US siege against the Caribbean island. Ukraine, Colombia and Brazil abstained, and only two supported the maintenance of the blockade: the USA and Israel.

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Features

Canada genocide evidence piles up

by Jim Morris

LEADERS of Indigenous groups in Canada say investigators have found at least 751 unmarked graves at the site of a former residential school for Indigenous children – a discovery that follows a report in May of 215 bodies found at another school.

The bodies were discovered at the Marieval Indian Residential School, which operated from 1899 to 1997 where the Cowessess First Nation is now located, about 85 miles east of Regina, the capital of Saskatchewan.

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Victory in Berlin: “We lived with one goal”

Sputnik

THE NEWS about Nazi Germany’s invasion led to the highest level of patriotism amongst the Soviet people despite initially causing alarm says Soviet war veteran Colonel Nikolai Zaitsev.

“Of course, the news of the invasion caused consternation. I felt that all of us somehow were confused: How are we to live now, what are we to do?” Zaitsev, who now lives in New York, said.

Zaitsev was a 16-year-old student in a small township near Barnaul in Siberia when Nazi Germany supported by the other Axis forces attacked the Soviet Union on 22nd June 1941.

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Martyred Fenians remembered in London

by Joe Dwyer

Republicans in London assembled in late May to lay wreaths and remember two executed patriots: the falsely accused Fenian Michael Barrett – executed in 1868 – and the ‘Invincible avenger’ Patrick O’Donnell – executed in 1883. Both patriots lie in a mass grave in the City of London Cemetery, containing the excavated mortal remains of those executed in the historic Newgate Prison.

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