PCS union reps in the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
(Efra) Group are currently gearing up for an industrial action ballot in the
Rural Payments Agency (RPA), the civil service body that is responsible for
making subsidy payments to farmers. The RPA is based at several large offices
in Exeter, Reading, Northallerton, Newcastle, Workington and Carlisle.
Members are angry that they are having a flawed reporting system
imposed on them without agreement of their union.

This
Friday, the national UNISON Industrial Action Committee meets to discuss their
response to the 55% vote in favour of strike action in local government over
pay. The vote is a clear rejection of Gordon Brown’s pay restraint and reflects
the impact that the economic crisis is having on thousands of UNISON members.
Yet the outcome of this ballot wasn’t a racing certainty by any means. In fact
the initial position of the Local Government Service Group Executive was
particularly muted.

In the recent local elections the BNP won 2 council seats in Nuneaton and Bedworth. Despite the work in some of the wards with leafletting against the BNP, wards that the BNP did not win, the LP deputy leader Harriet Harman saw fit to castigate local LP members for not working hard enough to prevent the BNP winning seats. So the blame is put on the members – not government policies. Secondly, prior to the local elections, the local LP MP Mike O’Brien, advised the LP members not to campaign against the BNP as such action would raise their profile! […]

AROUND 700 RMT Tube cleaners working
for four private contractors are to stage a series of strikes after voting by a
landslide 125-to-one margin for action to win the London living wage and decent
working conditions. Cleaners working for ISS, ITS, ICS
and GBM will not book on for shifts that commence during the 24 hours between
18:50 next Thursday, June 26 and 18:49 on Friday June 27.

Ireland, after a long period of economic boom, is
now feeling the effects of the worldwide slowdown. Some have made big money,
but at the other end of the social spectrum there are many who have lost out.
Now is the time to raise the banner of genuine socialism within the Republican
movement and the working class as a whole.

The British bourgeoisie and its apologists
have always tried to bury their revolutionary past. They continually promote
the false idea that “gradualism” has always been the true British tradition.
Revolutions were always affairs of the continent, but have no relevance here. Next
year, on the 450th anniversary of the death of the great
revolutionary Oliver Cromwell, will be no exception.

The Communications Workers Union (CWU) invited Hands Off Venezuela
along with other Latin American solidarity campaigns and guest speakers to
speak at a Latin America fringe meeting held on the opening day of the Union’s
Annual Conference in Liverpool last Sunday. The CWU
renewed their affiliation to Hands Off Venezuela, reaffirming the importance of
the Venezuelan revolution to workers here in the UK.

A MAJOR conference of European railway trade unionists
aimed at developing strategies to resist and reverse the tide of EU-driven rail
privatisation and ‘liberalisation’ is to be hosted in London on Tuesday by
Britain ‘s biggest rail union. RMT general
secretary Bob Crow, European Transport Workers’ Federation general secretary
Eduardo Chagas, Kelvin Hopkins MP and John Hendy QC will be among the keynote
speakers at the event, which will be attended by trade unionists from 15
European countries.