On January 4th a consultation meeting at
Ashington Leisure Centre in Northumberland was held by the Lib/Dem leadership
of the County Council to "discuss" the question of its closure. The council has to find £33m worth of cuts
this year and amongst the many services being targeted is the town’s very
popular and highly used leisure centre.
Recently we have seen many important events
happening in Venezuela, such as the devaluation of the bolívar and the
nationalisations in the banking sector, which needs to be analysed
carefully. The movement of occupied factories made important steps
forward last year, but still faces sabotage by counter-revolutionary
managers and workers are still struggling for nationalisation under
workers’ control. In order to defend the conquests already made, the
revolution must put the nationalisation of the commanding heights of
the economy on the agenda. Only this can destroy capitalism and provide
the necessary prerequisites for a socialist planned economy.
The scandal involving the wife of the First Minister has
revealed the utter hypocrisy of the politicians who run Stormont. While
they are perfectly prepared to impose draconian spending cuts on
welfare, they line their own pockets. The workers of the North require
a fighting working class political representation and not the present
bunch of parasites.
The nation of Haiti was hit with a
devastating earthquake. The governments of Cuba and Venezuela responded
within hours with medical brigades, firefighters, fuel and supplies,
and there has been massive sympathy, generosity and volunteerism from
workers around the world. What a difference compared to the response
from the United States. The U.S. government has pledged assistance
in the way of one hundred million dollars – less than is spent on the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in just two days.
There is a manmade element to the
catastrophe now confronting the Haitians. The country doesn’t just happen to be
poor; it has been made poor and kept poor. Haiti is the poorest country
in the Western hemisphere, with the worst infrastructure and a people
most vulnerable to disaster and disease, because of the machinations of
imperialism. Although the earthquake could not be avoided, the scale of
death and destruction clearly could have been.
It
won’t come as a big surprise to most thinking workers that a bunch of
Tory councillors sat around and made the decision to institute a pay
freeze in local government. No surprise that is because the memory of
Thatcherism is still etched on many workers minds and secondly because
with New Labour already advocating a 1% pay
ceiling on public sector pay, how were the Tories going to out do them?
Why, by offering less of course!
Following the break down of negotiations aimed at resolving the long
running dispute over shift changes and threatened job loss by the South
Yorkshire Fire Authority hundreds of firefighters are set for another
round of industrial action.
In the Labour Party and among Trade Union leaders here in Wales, it is
thought defeatist and almost traitorous, to express the belief that
Labour may lose the General Election this year. We look at how things are panning out in Wales and what Labour really needs to do to avoid defeat in the coming elections.
When New Labour came to power in 1997, Tony Blair stated that his top
three priorities were “education, education, education”. 13 years
later, and figures from a recent poll
show that over two-thirds of people in England believe that the
government has failed to deliver the improvement in education that it
promised.
The bankers are celebrating their orgies. Wall Street banks are set to
shell out $65bn in bonuses to the speculators who fouled up so
spectacularly and brought the credit crunch down on our heads. Some of
this largesse will drop into the laps of dealers in the City of London
and Canary Wharf. Goldman Sachs alone will lash out $20bn and JP
Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and Bank of America will stump up
another $65bn
This year, Britain experienced its coldest winter in over 30 years, and
as temperatures dropped below -20ºC in some parts of the UK, thousands
of people suffered the effects of one of society’s gravest ills: fuel
poverty.
According to official definitions, “a household is said to be in fuel
poverty if it needs to spend more than 10% of its income on fuel to
maintain an adequate level of warmth”; current figures estimate that
there are approximately 4.6 million “fuel poor” households in the UK.
The severity of the problem is such that the Office for National
Statistics calculated that there were 36,700 deaths in the winter of
2008/09 due to the cold weather.
Kingston upon Thames has become the latest target in ongoing attacks against the National Health Service.
Segments of the NHS are to be subject to renewed cuts and transfers
that will see medical care placed in the hands of the private sector.