HACKNEY carriage drivers in Watford have been in dispute for months with Silverlink after the train-operating company evicted them from the taxi rank. Silverlink have now let their rank to the highest bidding minicab firm. Members of the public now have to pre-book their taxi.
OVER 100,000 civil servants are set to strike on Tuesday and Wednesday. The workers in the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), the prisons service and the Office for National Statistics are fighting for decent pay. This is a crucial battle for the future of public services and the PCS civil servants' union. The government is out to break the PCS.
WHAT DO you get for bravely standing up to a bullying gang which management has failed to take action against? If you are Oxford postal workers then your bosses threaten you with "punitive action".
"THIS JUNE we have the opportunity to turn the elections into a referendum on Tony Blair's government, especially its policy of backing George Bush's war on terror." So says anti-war movement leader Lindsey German.
"THE BOSSES bleed us to death, then say, 'Thanks and sod off'." That was the reaction of a worker in Peugeot's Ryton car factory after the multinational announced 700 job cuts with the scrapping of the D, or night, shift.
IT IS not just Blair's government which has been plunged into crisis after lies about the war started to be unearthed. Revelations from Richard Clarke, who served under both Clinton and Bush as a counter-terrorism chief, have rocked the US White House.
"WE'RE INTO week five of our all-out strike and are even more determined to win than when we began." That's what Carol Ball, union convenor of 4,600 striking nursery nurses, told Socialist Worker. She was speaking after a magnificent 3,000-strong rally in Edinburgh outside the headquarters of Cosla, the umbrella body of Scottish local authority employers. Strikers left an empty table outside the building.
"I THINK imaginative stunts like this would be great in every region for creating much-needed publicity." So said James Button, a Nottingham Trent University student and member of the East Midlands steering committee for Respect. He was one of many Respect campaigners who have been taking part in activities to publicise Respect in the run-up to the 10 June elections.
ISRAEL'S ASSASSINATION of Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin has provoked fury among Palestinians and across the world. But British foreign secretary Jack Straw's main response was to call the killing a tactical error that was "very unlikely to achieve its objective". George Galloway MP, who heads the Respect coalition's list for the European Parliament in London, said, "The murder of Sheikh Yassin is an act of criminal insanity from the criminally insane prime minister Sharon.
THE FATHER of a British soldier killed at a police station north of Basra in Iraq told anti-war protesters last week, "I am with you." Reg Keys's son, Thomas, was killed in June last year with five other British military policemen. Mr Keys has no doubt who is to blame for his death:
ALLEGATIONS AGAINST George Galloway in a US paper that he was paid $10 million by Saddam Hussein were "false and without foundation", the High Court has ruled. The Christian Science Monitor based its libellous article on forged documents supposedly from 1992-3, which in reality were only a few months old when they were "discovered" in post-Saddam Baghdad.
ISRAELI PRIME minister Ariel Sharon organised the assassination of the Palestinian Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. The US government refused to condemn the murder. Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser, said: "Let's remember that Hamas is a terrorist organisation, and that Sheikh Yassin has been involved in terrorist planning."
