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POSTAL WORKERS in north London walked out unofficially last week in defence of union rep Mark Dolan and the right to free speech at work. Mark, who works at the giant NDO office in Islington, was involved in a discussion with fellow workers over the suicide attack on the World Trade Centre.

ANTI NAZI League activists, other anti-fascists and local residents protested in west London outside the Shirland Road Nazi "charity shop" on Saturday. The protest got off to a great start when we discovered that the Nazis had chosen not to open the shop for the day.

CLOTHING COMPANY Boxfresh has come a cropper. It launched a snide advertising campaign recently. Boxfresh used imagery and slogans from the Zapatista rebel group in Mexico. They were spraypainted on walls around major shopping areas in central London and passed as convincing propaganda from Zapatista supporters (until you got to the Boxfresh logo).

OVER 400 people packed into a snap meeting in central London called by the Socialist Workers Party on Friday of last week to discuss the aftermath of the destruction of the World Trade Centre. Similar meetings were to take place across Britain this week.

THE CIVIL service dispute in London is escalating. The PCS union has started to ballot its members in the Benefits Agency and Employment Service for indefinite strike action in over 50 Pathfinder offices. Staff are being balloted in offices from Exeter to Aberdeen.

THE GREEN Party annual conference took place in Salisbury last weekend in the wake of the party's best ever general election result. The Greens now have 49 local councillors, one member of the Scottish Parliament, two members of the European Parliament and three members of the Greater London Authority.

WOODFORD Green postal workers in east London came out from work last week to show their support for the demonstration in two week's time at Labour's conference.

ENGINEERS AT Daimler Chrysler, the major Mercedes Benz garage in Edgware Road, west London, struck on two days last week against a new shift working system. After six months of negotiations the company has announced it will make the entire technician workforce redundant at the end of October in order to impose new contracts.

SOME 30 people attended an excellent meeting of the Colombia Solidarity Campaign in London last Saturday. The focus of the campaign is opposition to the US-backed Plan Colombia, a military intervention in the South American country.

HUNDREDS OF Benefits Agency and Employment Service civil servants in the PCS union in south west London and Brent in west London are continuing their indefinite strike action. It is against management proposals to remove screens. The strikers all work in the government's new Pathfinder scheme.

THE CRUNCH is coming over privatisation in the Post Office. This week the postal regulator, PostComm, was expected to announce that it was awarding licences to private company Hays DX for mail collection and delivery. Hays wants to operate in the business districts of London, Edinburgh and Manchester, cherry-picking mail that is easy to move.

BOTH the RMT and ASLEF rail unions are to ballot members on London Underground in a dispute over pay. London Underground Limited (LUL) has already rejected the report of an independent mediator. This recommended a miserly pay increase of 4 percent and talks on the other aspects of the unions' claim.