SEVEN MORE victims of rail privatisation. They died last week at Potters Bar, just five miles from Hatfield where another crash killed four people 18 months ago. A rail worker warned his managers of loose bolts and unstable track at Potters Bar just three weeks ago.
THE MAIN party in Israel's ruling coalition has ruled out the creation of any state for the Palestinians, no matter how weak. The Likud party contains people even more ruthless and bloodthirsty than its leader, Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon. So much for "Israel's men of peace".
PENSIONERS ARE angry about poverty and insecurity-and millions more people will face the same problems in the near future. Around 2,500 pensioners met in Blackpool this week for the annual parliament organised by the National Pensioners Convention. Delegates were furious with a government that has let the basic state pension decline relative to earnings.
THOUSANDS OF council workers marched through central London on Tuesday demanding decent pay. The march was part of a one-day strike by over 50,000 council workers across the capital. Picket lines had been organised in many areas.
RAIL PRIVATISATION has led to a catastrophic collapse in safety standards. Nowhere is this clearer than in the maintenance of the infrastructure-track, signalling, tunnels, bridges, and so on. There were wholesale sackings of experienced rail workers in the run-up to privatisation in 1996.
EUROPE MINISTER Peter Hain is the latest politician to claim that the way to fight the racists is to accept some of their central arguments. Hain built his reputation as an opponent of apartheid. But in interviews on TV and in the Guardian at the beginning of the week he pandered to racist ideas. He claimed, "It's really, really important that we have an honest debate about immigration and asylum." But he then went on to repeat one of the biggest lies of the lot-that some countries are a "soft touch".
JOURNALISTS AT the Independent and Independent on Sunday start voting this week in a ballot which could see the first strike action on a national newspaper for well over a decade. The journalists' NUJ union has only recently won back union recognition on the papers. It is encouraging members to vote for both a strike and action short of a strike.
THE multinational Ford has again been exposed for institutional racism after a second Asian worker won an industrial tribunal. Shinder Singh Nagra spoke out in support of fellow Ford worker Sukhjit Parma, whose experience of repeated racist harassment became front- page news in 1999. Sukhjit was subjected to a four-year campaign of abuse by his foreman and group leader in the Engine Plant at Ford Dagenham.
MARGARET HODGE, minister for lifelong learning and higher education, succeeded in alienating every single delegate at the university lecturers' AUT union conference last week. She enraged people by insisting on calling students "customers".
