Christmas is very close and all the kids are eager in anticipation of what
Santa will bring them this year for being good. But who actually is that kind, old man with a bag full of nice gifts for
the children called Father Christmas or Santa Claus?
We follow up on the Farepak fiasco, that last year was responsible for wiping out the savings of 150,000 people. Victims are yet to have their savings returned to them – a mere £38 million in total. This despite the government being happy to prop up the collapsing Northern Rock with billions of tax-payers cash.
The Electoral Commission
has launched an investigation into an illegal donation to Wendy Alexander MSP’s
campaign to take over from Jack McConnell as Labour leader in the Scottish
Parliament. The crisis
unfolded when the Sunday Herald learned that every donation to the Wendy
campaign was under £1,000. Many were for £950. Under the Elections Act 2000,
all donations of £1,000 or more must be declared to the Electoral
Commission.
On Friday, December 7th, Al Jazeera’s programme The Listening Post
analysed the world’s media biased coverage of the constitutional reform
referendum. Amongst those interviewed was Alan Woods, founder of Hands
Off Venezuela.
Last August Northern Rock was the subject of the first run on a bank in
this country for a hundred and forty years. People queued up all night
to try to get their money back. But, of course, their money wasn’t
there. Where had it gone?
On Saturday November 24th,
around two hundred people attended the third national Hands Off Venezuela
conference in Britain.
The whole day was a great
success and left everyone inspired to carry on the struggle to defend the
Venezuelan people and their Bolivarian revolution.
LABOUR MP John McDonnell demanded that the Brown government make "a
choice between democracy or oligarchy" at the weekend. At Saturday’s
Hands Off Venezuela national conference in London, he condemned new
Labour’s ongoing hostility towards Venezuela and pledged to make
solidarity with the Bolivarian revolution an issue that "no MP would be
allowed to dodge."
In last May’s Scottish
Parliament elections the Scottish National Party (SNP) emerged victorious as voters
wilted under increasing attacks and cuts in public services – already threadbare
after the Thatcher Tory years – by the New Labour-Liberal coalition. Socialist Appeal carried
in-depth Marxist analysis at the time when
we predicted an SNP victory and the factors that had made it possible.
Multiculturalism is again under attack. And it’s not just from the BNP, but members of
New Labour. Following the bombings on London in 2005 Ruth
Kelly and David Blunkett called for a ‘British
identity’. Jack Straw asked women Muslims in his constituency
to remove their veils (the niqab), as he feels uncomfortable with
them. The chair of the Commission for Equalities and Human Rights has urged for
integration as a way forward, "to stop us from sleep walking into segregation".
The Health Care Commission accused the Kent and Sussex NHS Trust of
"significant failings in infection control" after 90 patients were
known to have died of the super-bug "Clostridium difficile" in three of
its hospitals last year. Kent police and the Health and
Safety Executive are considering the unprecedented action of pressing
manslaughter charges against the Trust.
This weekend supporters of the Venezuelan revolution will gather at the
University of London Union for the Hands off Venezuela National
conference. Speakers from Venezuela will include Guadalupe Rodriguez from the Coordinadora Simon Bolivar and Nelson Rodriguez from the Factory Committee at Inveval. Show your
solidarity with the revolutionary events taking place in Venezuela and
throughout Latin America – book your place today!
We have now had more than a decade of Private Finance Initiative
involvement in the health service. Despite Labour pouring money into
hospitals and health care, more and more health trusts are reporting
deficits. PFI is sucking the NHS dry!