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The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain


National News

Railway battles

by New Worker correspondent

ON WEDNESDAY morning RMT held a really outside Parliament to coincide with a two-hour strike action by hundreds of rail cleaners employed by Churchill on four contracts in the South East region. This affected trains and stations on Thameslink, Southern and Great Northern, Southeastern, Eurostar and HS1 services. The ballot brought 100 per cent vote for industrial action.

RMT General Secretary Mick Lynch said: “Our members’ already scandalously low pay is being eaten away and they are justifiably not putting up with it any longer.

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Cars and schools

by New Worker correspondent

A FEW weeks ago Unite secured a 5.1 per cent victory for outsourced cleaners at Ford’s of Dagenham and the Ford Dunton Technical Centre in Essex.

Over 150 cleaners, employed by Hamton Environmental Services cleaning contractors, overwhelmingly accepted a one-year 5.1 per cent pay deal backdated to 1 January 2022. The deal also included a commitment by to discuss specific concerns that members face regarding the company’s sickness policy in an effort to try to reach agreement.

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NHS and private health wars

by New Worker correspondent IN THE health service similar struggles to secure decent pay and conditions for outsourced workers are underway.

At Croydon University Hospital cleaners and porters employed by notorious outsourcer G4S are beginning to ballot for strike action. Regional organiser Helen O’Connor said: “G4S workers have been joining GMB in large numbers and voting in our indicative strike ballot.

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Small Victory

by New Worker correspondent

TO END on a small note of triumph, it deserves recording the case of a Columbian cleaner winning £38,000 compensation.

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Political News

by our Scottish political affairs correspondent

ONCE AGAIN, the unofficial opposition in Scotland has produced a critical report on one of Scotland’s malfunctioning institutions. Last year Stephen Boyle, the Auditor General, turned his fire on the Crofting Commission, which he described as having “unacceptable weaknesses”. His criticisms of the organisation that has the responsibility of overseeing 20,000 in the Highlands and islands have been endorsed by Holyrood’s Public Affairs Committee.

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Questions of Good Taste

by our Scottish political affairs correspondent

The departure of the BBC’s Scottish political editor for a grander post as the corporation’s North American political editor has set off a storm of controversy.

The Honourable Sarah Smith (Honourable by being the daughter of the late Labour leader John Smith whose widow is a baroness) signed off by saying that she had suffered “bile, hatred and misogyny” whilst covering Scottish politics. She said that she was glad to be leaving Scotland because in the USA she would be “gloriously anonymous”.

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A Public Sector Bonanza

by our Scottish political affairs correspondent

There has been some good news of employment growth in the Scottish public sector. It does not however, concern teachers, nurses or binmen, but SNP-government public relations staff. They have grown in numbers from 115 to 176 full-time-equivalent since 2018 and now cost £9 million per year, although they have not been very good at their job.

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UK wants co-operation with China, but is it ready to act?

Global Times

THE JOHNSON government’s China policy, at least in economic and trade areas, seems to have taken a fresh turn, with the Prime Minister reportedly seeking closer economic ties with China by restarting trade talks.

But the new development has seen a cabinet split over UK–China relations as some cabinet members, such as Foreign Minister Liz Truss, believe a tougher stance towards Beijing is more in line with the country’s security needs, the Independent reported on Sunday.

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Stand by the Donbas!

by New Worker correspondent

COMMUNISTS discussed the crisis in eastern Ukraine and the threat of war when the NCP held an online meeting with Donbas communist leaders last week. NCP leader Andy Brooks and London Organiser Theo Russell joined Boris Litvinov and his comrades from the Communist Party of the Donetsk People’s Republic (CPDPR) via video link on 17th February.

Donetsk communist leader Boris Litvinov spoke about the threat of a Ukrainian attack on the Donbas, the prospects for the recognition of the two Donbas people’s republics by the Russian Federation, and the relationship between the CPDPR, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) and the Ukrainian communist movement.

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Wales shows the way

by Aled Roberts

Welsh Language Commissioner Aled Roberts was a Welsh Liberal Democrat and a former member of the Welsh Parliament, the Senedd Cymru. He championed language rights in Wales showing what could be done in Ireland. In an article first published in An Phoblacht last year he showed how a model of language standards transformed the consistency and quality of how public institutions provide Welsh language services. He sadly passed away on 13th February.

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International News

Italian school students on the march

by New Worker correspondent

HUNDREDS of thousands of schoolkids held massive protests in Rome and more than 40 cities across Italy last week, demanding the government to end the obligatory work placements in the last three years of school. In Turin, their anger exploded into violence when a group of students tried to break into the local headquarters of industrial employer’s group Confindustria and were beaten back by the riot police.

[Read the complete story in the print edition]

A helping hand in Latin America

by Roberto Morejón

THE VISIT of a high-ranking Russian leader to Latin American and Caribbean countries reaffirmed the co-operation ties, although the imperialist press ignored it.

The vice-president of the Russian government, Yuri Borisov, has just completed a busy schedule in Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba, where he met with high-ranking officials and received a warm welcome. It is not surprising given the close bilateral relations, hence the bad faith of the corporate press in imputing gloomy contours to the trip.

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The first-ever carbon-neutral Olympics

by Lyn Neeley

THIS YEAR’S Beijing Winter Olympics was the first in history to be carbon-neutral. This included renewable energy in all game venues, introducing new low-carbon technologies and using transportation fuelled by hydrogen, natural gas and electricity.

People’s China completed the Zhangbei power grid station in time for the Olympics. That’s the world’s first renewable energy-based, flexible direct current (DC) power transmission system. This means, according to China Daily that the system has “strong controllability, fast power adjustment speed and a flexible operation mode, compared with AC and conventional DC. It is considered the ‘golden key’ to solve the problem of large-scale consumption of new energy.”

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Features

Uyghur Olympic torch-bearer upsets the bourgeois media’s lies

by Callum Wilson and Liu Xuegang

Fifty-six constellations, fifty-six flowers in bloom
Fifty-six ethnicities, brothers and sisters in one family

Lyrics from the theme song of the 4th National Traditional Games of Ethnic Minorities, 1991, China

THIRTY-ONE YEARS after this wildly popular Chinese song from another nationally celebrated sporting event, these same 56 brothers and sisters were all present, carrying the Chinese national flag out in an emotionally resonating scene during the opening ceremony of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.

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The Hypocrisy of the Western media

by Morgan Artyukhina

THE WESTERN media has been foaming at the mouth over the growing friendship between Russia and China, portraying them as enemies of ‘democracy’. They are, according to the Americans, “malign actors” against whose rise Washington must strategically focus itself.

The latest article by David Leonhardt in the New York Times (NYT) is provocatively titled A New Axis. He says that the recent joint statement by Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping is aimed at the USA and bleats that they predict a “redistribution of power in the world” away from the USA and Western Europe and towards multipolarity.

[Read the complete story in the print edition]