Barclays gags Guardian over tax
Injunction forces news website to remove seven leaked memos showing how bank avoided hundreds of millions of pounds in tax
Staff reporter guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 17 March 2009
Barclays Bank obtained a court order early today banning the Guardian from publishing documents which showed how the bank set up companies to avoid hundreds of millions of pounds in tax.
The gagging order was granted by Mr Justice Ouseley after Barclays complained about seven documents on the Guardian's website which had been leaked to the Liberal Democrats' deputy leader, Vince Cable.
The internal Barclays memos – leaked by a Barclays whistleblower – showed executives from SCM, Barclays's structured capital markets division, seeking approval for a 2007 plan to sink more than $16bn (£11.4bn) into US loans.
Tax benefits were to be generated by an elaborate circuit of Cayman islands companies, US partnerships and Luxembourg subsidiaries.
The documents had been leaked to Cable by a former employee of the bank, who wrote a long account of how the bank works.
The anonymous whistleblower wrote to Cable: "The last year has seen the global taxpayer having to rescue the global financial system. The taxpayer has already had a gun put to their head and been told to pay up or watch the financial system and life as we know it disappear into a black hole.
"It is a commonly held view that no agency in the US or the UK has the resources or the commitment to challenge SCM. SCM has huge amounts of resources, the best minds rewarded by millions of pounds. Compare this with HMRC [Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs] recently advertising for a tax and accounting expert with the pay at £45,000.
"Through the use of lawyers and client confidentiality SCM regularly circumvents these rules, just one example of why HMRC will never, in its current state, be up to the job of combating this business."
The Guardian's decision to publish the documents came on a day when the chancellor, Alistair Darling, told parliament he had asked HMRC to publish shortly a draft code of practice on taxation for banks "so that banks will comply not just with the letter of the law but the spirit of the law".
Barclays's lawyers, Freshfields, worked into the early hours to force the Guardian to remove the documents from the website. They argued that the documents were the property of Barclays and could only have been leaked by someone who acquired them wrongfully and in breach of confidentiality agreements.
The Guardian's solicitor, Geraldine Proudler, was woken by the judge at 2am and asked to argue the Guardian's case by telephone. Around 2.31am, Mr Justice Ouseley issued an order for the documents to be removed from the Guardian's website.
Cable said it was both "incongruous" and "offensive" that banks that rely on state support should avoid paying tax and therefore be "selling the taxpayer short". Although the taxpayer has not had to directly support Barclays by taking an equity stake, the bank had relied on the government's special liquidity scheme to provide funding for loans.
"The banks are able to organise their activities in such a way that they can run rings around the Inland Revenue," he told the Telegraph. "It serves no other purpose than to reduce tax. The fundamental point is that it is incongruous and offensive that banks which are either directly or indirectly dependent on the government should be systematically finding ways to avoid tax."
Cable, who passed the documents to HMRC and the Financial Services Authority, told the Sunday Times this week: "The documents suggest a deeply ingrained culture of tax avoidance. The Barclays team looks like the spider at the centre of a highly artificial web of non-transparent transactions through tax havens. Reputable banks don't turn tax avoidance into a profit machine."
A Guardian spokesman said this morning that the paper would appeal against the order. "Tax avoidance is a matter of high public and political interest. These documents showed for the first time how major banks set up artificial schemes with the aim of earning hundreds of millions in tax-free money, which is why the Barclays whistleblower leaked them.
"All decisions about tax are taken in secret, hidden from public view. It is not right for a judge to prevent daylight from shining on the few documents ever to have emerged which graphically demonstrate what HMRC is up against."
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
The State That Tolerates No Criticism - ONE VIEW OF THE STATE of ISRAEL
The State That Tolerates No Criticism
How Israel Gives Jews a Bad Name
By SAUL LANDAU
March 15, 2009 "Counterpunch" --- Most Jews I know get little pleasure from the existence of Israel; just the opposite. They feel disgusted by the behavior of their tribal kin toward Palestinians. This antipathy doesn’t concern Israel’s right to exist, a phony argument still maintained by hard line Zionists. Israel exists, period. Most of the world recognizes that. Anyone wanting to eliminate it belongs in the loony bin or prison.
Israelis have just elected a right wing majority. The number three vote-getting party, Yisrael Beytenu led by Avigdor Lieberman, will occupy a strong place in the new government. Lieberman will become a Minister in the Netanyahu Cabinet. Last year, Lieberman rammed through Israel’s Central Election Committee a ban on Arab political parties. The Israeli Supreme Court ruled the ban unconstitutional before the recent election. Lieberman also demanded the Knesset expel Arab Members. He went further. If Arab citizens of Israel don’t sign oaths of loyalty to Israel, they should have their citizenship revoked. Disloyalty for Arabs included students wearing kefiyahs to school; Muslim Israelis collecting medicine and aid for Gaza relief also falls into the non-trustworthy category.
During the 2008-9 invasion of Gaza, Lieberman wanted the military operation to continue until Hamas “loses the will to fight.” In a speech at Bar-Ilan University, he said Israel’s government had “to come to a decision that we will break the will of Hamas to keep fighting.” Lieberman concluded in the January 13 Jerusalem Post: “We must continue to fight Hamas just like the United States did with the Japanese in World War II. Then, too, the occupation of the country was unnecessary.” In 1945, US Air Force planes dropped atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Japan surrendered unconditionally.
Lieberman has acquired a powerful defender in the United States. Abraham Foxman, National Director of the Anti-Defamation League, backed Lieberman’s plan to require Israeli Arab citizens to sign an oath of allegiance to the Jewish state.” (Feb 10, Jewish Telegraphic Agency)
Foxman ignored the ADL’s mission, opposing racial discrimination and the words of the ADL Charter. The Anti-Defamation League aims “to secure justice and fair treatment to all.” In Israel, it’s apparently OK with Foxman to strip an Arab wearing the wrong covering of citizenship. Without citizenship, Arabs can’t vote or participate in politics; very old Jews from some European countries may recall similar rules.
My grandfather taught me, growing up during the Holocaust, that Jewish tradition teaches each person to strive to become a pillar of ethics, learn the law and behave so as to answer to God for transgressions – not to rulers of a so-called Jewish state.
Ironically, in the name of all Jews, Foxman and colleagues in AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) and other Israeli lobby groups along with right wing and centrist political parties in Israel invoke the Holocaust to justify the very behavior embodied by Holocaust initiators. Israel calls itself a Jewish state. Yet, one fifth of Israel’s population is non-Jewish. I don’t belong to that state and despise its policies of constant war and occupation.
Count Israel’s wars: 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, plus civil wars against two Intifadas in the 1980s and 2000, and finally the invasions of Lebanon in 2006 and Gaza in late 2008, the latter leaving in its wake 1,300 plus dead Palestinians, most of them civilians and less than 20 Israelis, some from “friendly fire.”
Condemned by the Red Cross, Amnesty International and a host of organizations for violating human rights of Gaza’s people, Israel’s new government will almost certainly continue or even harden the policies. They don’t care what others say.
Dr. Erik Fosse, a Norwegian cardiologist, working in Gaza hospitals during the Israeli invasion described his patients’ wounds. “It was as if they had stepped on a mine,” he says of certain Palestinian. “But there was no shrapnel in the wound. Some had lost their legs. It looked as though they had been sliced off. I have been to war zones for 30 years, but I have never seen such injuries before.”
The “focused lethality” weapon, to which Fosse referred does minimal damage to buildings, but catastrophic harm to humans. The United States supplied these to Israel.
Israeli Defense Forces have also used white phosphorus in Beirut in 1982 and again in Gaza. The intense heat of the metal inflicts appalling damage. The IDF knows international law prohibits its use near populated areas. Donatella Rovera of Amnesty International labeled as “a war crime” the use of phosphorous “in Gaza’s densely-populated residential neighborhoods.” (Guardian, January 21, 2009)
Israel initially denied using the chemical. On January 13, Israeli Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi solemnly declared: “The IDF acts only in accordance with what is permitted by international law and does not use white phosphorus.” Gazans and Israelis, however, saw the material and the victims of it. On January 20, the IDF admitted using phosphorus artillery and mortar shells on “Hamas fighters and rocket launching crews in northern Gaza.”
On January 15, three shells hit the UN Relief and Works Agency compound. The resulting fire destroyed tons of humanitarian supplies. A phosphorus shell also hit Al-Quds hospital in Gaza City. According to the Guardian, the Israelis claimed Hamas fighters had hidden near the two targets. Witnesses denied the charge. (January 21, 2009)
UN officials cited witnesses who claimed Israel killed 31 family members whom Israeli troops had led into a house in Zeitun. Twenty four hours after the IDF warned the Palestinians to remain, the IDF shelled the dwelling. Half of the dead were children. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) called it “one of the gravest incidents since the beginning of operations” by Israeli forces in Gaza. (AFP, December 27, 2008).
Such facts caused distinguished people like Jimmy Carter and Bill Moyers to question Israeli behavior. Foxman quickly labeled Moyers as anti-Semitic. Those opposing Israel’s invasion of Gaza, or her occupying of Palestinian territory (for 40 plus years), or her mistreatment of all Palestinians receive the anti-Semitic label. Any criticism of Israel begets that description.
In discussions with Jewish defenders of the recent invasion of Gaza, however, I found more defensiveness. During one argument an ardent pro Israeli changed the subject. “But Israel enjoys free speech and press!”
Yes, a small minority vigorously criticize Israeli government policy – there, not here in the United States where a Member of Congress characterized an attack by the Israeli lobby as the equivalent of a pit bull biting him in the leg. Israeli’s daily Ha’aretz provides an example of such criticism, including articles damning the latest invasion as both a failure and immoral (Gideon Levy, February 19, 2009). Similar criticism in a US newspaper would cause Foxman and company to call major press conferences to “expose anti-Semitism.” When Jimmy Carter published his 2006 book, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, critical of Israeli policy, Foxman stopped just short of accusing the former President of anti-semitism. “You have been feeding into conspiracy theories about excessive Jewish power and control,” he wrote in a letter. “Considering the history of anti-Semitism, even in our great country, this is very dangerous stuff.” (Shmuel Rosner, Ha’artez Dec. 20, 2006)
When less powerful Jewish American scholars write books or give lectures attacking Israeli policy, they get fired or their tenure withheld. Norman Finkelstein (son of Holocaust survivors) was denied tenure in 2007 by the President of DePaul University, despite favorable recommendations by faculty and students. In 2000, he published The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering. The President of Bard College recently dismissed Joel Kovel, another internationally applauded scholar. Kovel’s 2007 book, Overcoming Zionism, triggered the action.
In the Finkelstein case, an important Zionist activist, Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, demanded the action. He had threatened Finkelstein with law suits after Finkelstein accused him of plagiarism and lying – charges documented in his 2005 book, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History. (University of California Press) Kovel attacked militant Israeli supporter Martin Peretz, longtime editor of The New Republic.
The ADL supported both dismissals. In past decades, ADL vibrated with anger over anti-Semitic signs spray painted on subway bathroom walls. Now, its leader endorses a McCarthyite platform in his beloved Israel. Anyone who does not conform to ADL’s fiercely pro Zionist agenda becomes vulnerable to accusations of anti-Semitism.
From 1998-2006, I occasionally invited speakers to campus who criticized Israeli policy. Inevitably, I would then receive letters, e-mails (copies to the University President), and phone calls accusing me of bias or being a “self-hating Jew.”
“How can you say that?” I asked one caller. “You don’t know me.”
“You’re all alike, you people who hate Israel,” the man responded.
“You’re the Jew-hating Jew,” I responded. “You hate me and don’t know me. I wish you could listen to your own voice.”
“I know anti-Semites when I talk to them,” he shouted into the phone and hung up.
“Long Live Israel,” scream the US fans. “Anyone who doesn’t like our team is an anti-Semite.”
I want to shout: “Go Back to Israel where you didn’t come from.”
Saul Landau is an IPS Fellow, author of A BUSH AND BOTOX WORLD (Counterpunch) and director of forty films, available on dvd from roundworldproductions.com
How Israel Gives Jews a Bad Name
By SAUL LANDAU
March 15, 2009 "Counterpunch" --- Most Jews I know get little pleasure from the existence of Israel; just the opposite. They feel disgusted by the behavior of their tribal kin toward Palestinians. This antipathy doesn’t concern Israel’s right to exist, a phony argument still maintained by hard line Zionists. Israel exists, period. Most of the world recognizes that. Anyone wanting to eliminate it belongs in the loony bin or prison.
Israelis have just elected a right wing majority. The number three vote-getting party, Yisrael Beytenu led by Avigdor Lieberman, will occupy a strong place in the new government. Lieberman will become a Minister in the Netanyahu Cabinet. Last year, Lieberman rammed through Israel’s Central Election Committee a ban on Arab political parties. The Israeli Supreme Court ruled the ban unconstitutional before the recent election. Lieberman also demanded the Knesset expel Arab Members. He went further. If Arab citizens of Israel don’t sign oaths of loyalty to Israel, they should have their citizenship revoked. Disloyalty for Arabs included students wearing kefiyahs to school; Muslim Israelis collecting medicine and aid for Gaza relief also falls into the non-trustworthy category.
During the 2008-9 invasion of Gaza, Lieberman wanted the military operation to continue until Hamas “loses the will to fight.” In a speech at Bar-Ilan University, he said Israel’s government had “to come to a decision that we will break the will of Hamas to keep fighting.” Lieberman concluded in the January 13 Jerusalem Post: “We must continue to fight Hamas just like the United States did with the Japanese in World War II. Then, too, the occupation of the country was unnecessary.” In 1945, US Air Force planes dropped atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Japan surrendered unconditionally.
Lieberman has acquired a powerful defender in the United States. Abraham Foxman, National Director of the Anti-Defamation League, backed Lieberman’s plan to require Israeli Arab citizens to sign an oath of allegiance to the Jewish state.” (Feb 10, Jewish Telegraphic Agency)
Foxman ignored the ADL’s mission, opposing racial discrimination and the words of the ADL Charter. The Anti-Defamation League aims “to secure justice and fair treatment to all.” In Israel, it’s apparently OK with Foxman to strip an Arab wearing the wrong covering of citizenship. Without citizenship, Arabs can’t vote or participate in politics; very old Jews from some European countries may recall similar rules.
My grandfather taught me, growing up during the Holocaust, that Jewish tradition teaches each person to strive to become a pillar of ethics, learn the law and behave so as to answer to God for transgressions – not to rulers of a so-called Jewish state.
Ironically, in the name of all Jews, Foxman and colleagues in AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) and other Israeli lobby groups along with right wing and centrist political parties in Israel invoke the Holocaust to justify the very behavior embodied by Holocaust initiators. Israel calls itself a Jewish state. Yet, one fifth of Israel’s population is non-Jewish. I don’t belong to that state and despise its policies of constant war and occupation.
Count Israel’s wars: 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, plus civil wars against two Intifadas in the 1980s and 2000, and finally the invasions of Lebanon in 2006 and Gaza in late 2008, the latter leaving in its wake 1,300 plus dead Palestinians, most of them civilians and less than 20 Israelis, some from “friendly fire.”
Condemned by the Red Cross, Amnesty International and a host of organizations for violating human rights of Gaza’s people, Israel’s new government will almost certainly continue or even harden the policies. They don’t care what others say.
Dr. Erik Fosse, a Norwegian cardiologist, working in Gaza hospitals during the Israeli invasion described his patients’ wounds. “It was as if they had stepped on a mine,” he says of certain Palestinian. “But there was no shrapnel in the wound. Some had lost their legs. It looked as though they had been sliced off. I have been to war zones for 30 years, but I have never seen such injuries before.”
The “focused lethality” weapon, to which Fosse referred does minimal damage to buildings, but catastrophic harm to humans. The United States supplied these to Israel.
Israeli Defense Forces have also used white phosphorus in Beirut in 1982 and again in Gaza. The intense heat of the metal inflicts appalling damage. The IDF knows international law prohibits its use near populated areas. Donatella Rovera of Amnesty International labeled as “a war crime” the use of phosphorous “in Gaza’s densely-populated residential neighborhoods.” (Guardian, January 21, 2009)
Israel initially denied using the chemical. On January 13, Israeli Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi solemnly declared: “The IDF acts only in accordance with what is permitted by international law and does not use white phosphorus.” Gazans and Israelis, however, saw the material and the victims of it. On January 20, the IDF admitted using phosphorus artillery and mortar shells on “Hamas fighters and rocket launching crews in northern Gaza.”
On January 15, three shells hit the UN Relief and Works Agency compound. The resulting fire destroyed tons of humanitarian supplies. A phosphorus shell also hit Al-Quds hospital in Gaza City. According to the Guardian, the Israelis claimed Hamas fighters had hidden near the two targets. Witnesses denied the charge. (January 21, 2009)
UN officials cited witnesses who claimed Israel killed 31 family members whom Israeli troops had led into a house in Zeitun. Twenty four hours after the IDF warned the Palestinians to remain, the IDF shelled the dwelling. Half of the dead were children. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) called it “one of the gravest incidents since the beginning of operations” by Israeli forces in Gaza. (AFP, December 27, 2008).
Such facts caused distinguished people like Jimmy Carter and Bill Moyers to question Israeli behavior. Foxman quickly labeled Moyers as anti-Semitic. Those opposing Israel’s invasion of Gaza, or her occupying of Palestinian territory (for 40 plus years), or her mistreatment of all Palestinians receive the anti-Semitic label. Any criticism of Israel begets that description.
In discussions with Jewish defenders of the recent invasion of Gaza, however, I found more defensiveness. During one argument an ardent pro Israeli changed the subject. “But Israel enjoys free speech and press!”
Yes, a small minority vigorously criticize Israeli government policy – there, not here in the United States where a Member of Congress characterized an attack by the Israeli lobby as the equivalent of a pit bull biting him in the leg. Israeli’s daily Ha’aretz provides an example of such criticism, including articles damning the latest invasion as both a failure and immoral (Gideon Levy, February 19, 2009). Similar criticism in a US newspaper would cause Foxman and company to call major press conferences to “expose anti-Semitism.” When Jimmy Carter published his 2006 book, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, critical of Israeli policy, Foxman stopped just short of accusing the former President of anti-semitism. “You have been feeding into conspiracy theories about excessive Jewish power and control,” he wrote in a letter. “Considering the history of anti-Semitism, even in our great country, this is very dangerous stuff.” (Shmuel Rosner, Ha’artez Dec. 20, 2006)
When less powerful Jewish American scholars write books or give lectures attacking Israeli policy, they get fired or their tenure withheld. Norman Finkelstein (son of Holocaust survivors) was denied tenure in 2007 by the President of DePaul University, despite favorable recommendations by faculty and students. In 2000, he published The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering. The President of Bard College recently dismissed Joel Kovel, another internationally applauded scholar. Kovel’s 2007 book, Overcoming Zionism, triggered the action.
In the Finkelstein case, an important Zionist activist, Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, demanded the action. He had threatened Finkelstein with law suits after Finkelstein accused him of plagiarism and lying – charges documented in his 2005 book, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History. (University of California Press) Kovel attacked militant Israeli supporter Martin Peretz, longtime editor of The New Republic.
The ADL supported both dismissals. In past decades, ADL vibrated with anger over anti-Semitic signs spray painted on subway bathroom walls. Now, its leader endorses a McCarthyite platform in his beloved Israel. Anyone who does not conform to ADL’s fiercely pro Zionist agenda becomes vulnerable to accusations of anti-Semitism.
From 1998-2006, I occasionally invited speakers to campus who criticized Israeli policy. Inevitably, I would then receive letters, e-mails (copies to the University President), and phone calls accusing me of bias or being a “self-hating Jew.”
“How can you say that?” I asked one caller. “You don’t know me.”
“You’re all alike, you people who hate Israel,” the man responded.
“You’re the Jew-hating Jew,” I responded. “You hate me and don’t know me. I wish you could listen to your own voice.”
“I know anti-Semites when I talk to them,” he shouted into the phone and hung up.
“Long Live Israel,” scream the US fans. “Anyone who doesn’t like our team is an anti-Semite.”
I want to shout: “Go Back to Israel where you didn’t come from.”
Saul Landau is an IPS Fellow, author of A BUSH AND BOTOX WORLD (Counterpunch) and director of forty films, available on dvd from roundworldproductions.com
Saturday, March 07, 2009
PUBLIC MEETING IN GLASGOW
Come and hear the case for socialism in Scotland and how some workers are fighting back.
All welcome
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Monday, December 24, 2007
Justice For Jean - no cover up
MENEZES FAMILY BRAND IPCC DISCIPLINARY DECISION A 'SCANDAL'
The family of Jean Charles de Menezes reacted with anger today at the decision by the IPCC not to recommend disciplinary action against the four senior officers involved in the botched anti-terrorism operation that led to the fatal shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes.
Vivian Figuierdo, cousin of Jean, who lived with him at the time of the shooting said:
"The decision today is a scandal. It is entirely premature for the IPCC to do this before an inquest where vital evidence about the actions of these officers could come to light. Sadly we have come to expect this from the IPCC – they have done nothing to hold the police to account for the killing of an innocent man. Time after time they simply bow down to police pressure and protect the status quo. If the jury at the health and safety trial found the police guilty of catastrophic errors – why is it that no police officer is being held individually accountable? This decision comes at the end of a very difficult year for us; to be told, just before Christmas that not a single police officer will be held responsible has ruined our festive season when we have already suffered enough. It's the worst Christmas present we could get"
Harriet Wistrich, solicitor for the Menezes family said
"Twice the IPCC have invited us to make representations as to the timing of a decision in relation to discipline. On both occasions we strongly urged the IPCC not to announce the decision prior to all the evidence being explored. It is disappointing that the IPCC have disregarded the serious objections raised and that this decision is made before the family's legal representatives have been given any disclosure of the evidence other than the IPCC report. We fear that if new evidence emerges at the inquest it may be harder to bring disciplinary decisions in the future as officers could argue abuse of process"
A spokesperson for the Justice4Jean campaign said
"It is nothing short of a public scandal that despite two lengthy and critical IPCC reports and a damning jury verdict at the Old Bailey, the IPCC and the MPA still cannot find any reason to bring disciplinary action against a single person for the shooting dead of Jean Charles de Menezes. The IPCC has shown it is no better than the discredited Police Complaints Authority that it replaced in holding police to account. The cynical and disgusting timing of this announcement is a clear attempt to bury bad news. It is clearly time for the government to review the effectiveness of the IPCC"
The family of Jean Charles de Menezes reacted with anger today at the decision by the IPCC not to recommend disciplinary action against the four senior officers involved in the botched anti-terrorism operation that led to the fatal shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes.
Vivian Figuierdo, cousin of Jean, who lived with him at the time of the shooting said:
"The decision today is a scandal. It is entirely premature for the IPCC to do this before an inquest where vital evidence about the actions of these officers could come to light. Sadly we have come to expect this from the IPCC – they have done nothing to hold the police to account for the killing of an innocent man. Time after time they simply bow down to police pressure and protect the status quo. If the jury at the health and safety trial found the police guilty of catastrophic errors – why is it that no police officer is being held individually accountable? This decision comes at the end of a very difficult year for us; to be told, just before Christmas that not a single police officer will be held responsible has ruined our festive season when we have already suffered enough. It's the worst Christmas present we could get"
Harriet Wistrich, solicitor for the Menezes family said
"Twice the IPCC have invited us to make representations as to the timing of a decision in relation to discipline. On both occasions we strongly urged the IPCC not to announce the decision prior to all the evidence being explored. It is disappointing that the IPCC have disregarded the serious objections raised and that this decision is made before the family's legal representatives have been given any disclosure of the evidence other than the IPCC report. We fear that if new evidence emerges at the inquest it may be harder to bring disciplinary decisions in the future as officers could argue abuse of process"
A spokesperson for the Justice4Jean campaign said
"It is nothing short of a public scandal that despite two lengthy and critical IPCC reports and a damning jury verdict at the Old Bailey, the IPCC and the MPA still cannot find any reason to bring disciplinary action against a single person for the shooting dead of Jean Charles de Menezes. The IPCC has shown it is no better than the discredited Police Complaints Authority that it replaced in holding police to account. The cynical and disgusting timing of this announcement is a clear attempt to bury bad news. It is clearly time for the government to review the effectiveness of the IPCC"
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Money as Debt - how we are robbed by capitalism
Here is a great explanation of the world money system. It is done in an informal way using cartoons and graphics.
NB: A warning this video is over 45 mins long
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Summer's almost gone -
The nights are creeping in and the leaves start to turn. The weather has been atrocious this summer but the industrial climate has been red hot. The posties, social work staff, even prison officers! are taking or have taken strike action to defend jobs and services.
The need to support these workers has been at the forefront of our party's work and will continue into the autumn.
The branch will be meeting again to discuss.........details in your Inbox!
The need to support these workers has been at the forefront of our party's work and will continue into the autumn.
The branch will be meeting again to discuss.........details in your Inbox!
Friday, July 06, 2007
Friday, June 29, 2007
CWU - National Strike 29th June
Solidarity members visited the pickets lines at Underwood Road sorting office to show support for the Post Office workers taking national industrial action for the first time in 11 years.
We spoke to a local official who told us that support for the strike was overwhelming in the area with only a handful of non-members at work.
We brought Solidarity bulletins to the CWU picket lines which were well received. We offered to assist the strikers where we are able to and promised that we will return on future strike days.
We spoke to a local official who told us that support for the strike was overwhelming in the area with only a handful of non-members at work.
We brought Solidarity bulletins to the CWU picket lines which were well received. We offered to assist the strikers where we are able to and promised that we will return on future strike days.
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