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!
The London Fire Brigade have been trying to impose a change in the
current shift system on its fire-fighters. This has been in the
pipeline for some time and would benefit the LFB management to the
detriment of its workforce.
As winter creeps, in students and staff at Edinburgh schools and nurseries have learned
of the chilling news that their places of learning and work places may be under
threat once again. The Edinburgh Evening News reported on the thirtieth of
October that Edinburgh Council intended to reopen a consultation process that
would look into the future of schools. It also listed seventeen schools and
nurseries that it expected to be earmarked for the process.
Marxists have always maintained that
at some stage the intensity of the class struggle affects even the "armed
bodies of men" of the bourgeois state. Such an example was the police strike in
Britain at the end of the First World War. In the late summer of 1918 the sight
of 12,000 furious Metropolitan constables marching on Whitehall sparked panic
among ruling circles in Britain. Under the leadership of the National Union of
Police and Prison Officers, militantly class-conscious policemen conspired to
overturn their role as the subservient body of the State.
BBC staff are set to ballot for strike over plans to axe up to 2500
jobs. The mood is angry and a big ‘yes’ vote is likely among the 23,000
workers. The three unions involved are Bectu, Unite and the National
Union of Journalists.
In the Guardian on September 4th George Monbiot gave a classic
example of PFI madness. In Coventry officials wanted to refurbish its
two hospitals.This would have cost £30m. They didn’t have £30m, so they had to go for PFI.
After weeks of media speculation the Brown bounce election became the general
election that never happened. Marx explained that the state and politics are like a superstructure that sits on top of society and maintains the appearance of having a certain independence. But in the final analysis, politics, the state and even bouncing Prime Ministers are organically connected to the real world. The prospect of a general election was just too risky.
King Abdullah of Saudi
Arabia is occupying the headlines of many newspapers with
his comments that Britain
failed to act on intelligence that could have prevented the 7/7 London bombings. Beyond
the response of the bourgeois media, what is the real relationship between the
West and Saudi Arabia?
The UK Social Atlas
states that British society is becoming more and more segregated into
classes, and British people are becoming more and more conscious of the
class society in which we live. The report ‘finds’ that Britain is
becoming increasingly segregated along the lines of class, education,
income, occupation, health status and family type.
You’ve probably never heard of Punch Taverns. But you may well have
had a drink in one of their 9,000 pubs. Chief executive Giles Thorley awarded
himself £11.3 million last. Punch Taverns
has the biggest gap between executive and workers’ pay in Britain.