Snap-Shots on West London Workers’ History

One of the disadvantages our class faces today is having been robbed of its historical perspective. The bourgeoisie on the other hand can look at pictures of their land-grabbing, mill-owning, slave-trading ancestors up and down the stairs

Angry Workers of the World

Beyond White City – Some Snap-Shots on West London Workers’ History

In order to get our heads around Greenford, Southall, Park Royal area today, seeing how this area developed over the last century can help. Below you can find some first random excavations. We take it as a background for future more specific articles, local walks and interviews with local working class militants, who have been around and active much longer than we have. We also plan to turn some of this material into articles for our local workers’ paper: many workers from Poland know little about the struggles of Black workers in the 1960s and 70s and colleagues in general are probably not aware about the mass militancy of organised workers which shook this area half a century ago. Most of the historical material ad quotes we found in a splendid new book: “All in a day’s work –…

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Care crisis hits the NHS as delayed discharges reach record high of 1.8 MILLION days

Sentinel News

• Patients left lying in hospital because of lack of adult care services
• Total number of delayed discharges up 30 percent since 2011/12
• Government attempts to alleviate the adult care crisis having no effect

By Chaminda Jayanetti

The number of delayed discharges in the NHS and adult care system reached record highs in 2015/16 amid the ongoing social care crisis, according to official figures published yesterday.

The number of patients whose discharge from hospitals and other health facilities was delayed for non-clinical reasons rose by nearly 10 percent in 2015/16, to more than 60,000 – a rise of nearly 30 percent since 2011/12, the first full year in which the data was measured.

The total length of delayed discharges reached more than 1.8 million days, up nearly a third since 2011/12. This suggests that each delay lasts a month on average.

Delayed discharges are officially called Delayed Transfers of Care, and…

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Fraud And Error Soaring In Universal Credit And Benefit Underpayments Hit Record High

the void

The UK’s biggest benefit scammer Lord Fraud.

Fraud and error in the Universal Credit system is soaring whilst the rate of benefits going unpaid overall has hit a ten year high national statistics released last week have shown.

Statistics examining fraud and error within the benefit’s system are released annually and this is the first year that Universal Credit has been included. Almost 250,000 people are currently claiming the new benefit which is set to eventually replace all mainstream out of work benefits along with tax credits and housing benefit. One of the reasons given by ministers for such sweeping changes to social security was that Universal Credit would help cut fraud and error within the system. Last week’s statistics show that the opposite is happening.

Over-payments due to fraud and error make up 7.3% of Universal Credit’s total expenditure – higher than any other benefit the DWP administrates. The…

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Who are the C.C.G. kidding, is it you?

Wessex Solidarity

You should have been there on Wednesday at the Dorset open C.C.G. meeting; no, really, you should have. With protestors from all over the county we had just enough to fill the available seating and an overflow room but the long awaited angry pitchfork-wielding mob is still holding out on us. The whole rigmarole resulted from an off the cuff remark at an earlier open meeting last summer when one of our number asked to see the costing. The following day it was announced the decision was to be deferred until now. Evidently they hadn’t bothered to do the costing, since the decision had already been taken and they think we’re a bunch of fucking yokels. They’ve since spent £2.9 million on a ‘review’.

The suits staged a piece of choreographed P.R. bullshit, commencing with a presentation involving some silly diagrams projected on a side wall that fewer than half…

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“The only protection we have is solidarity from the outside”: news from courts and prisons in Sweden, the UK and the US

Cautiously pessimistic

Here in the UK, last month saw eight people who took action against the DSEi arms fair beat the charges after the court sided with their argument that they were trying to stop illegal weapons sales, as their “belief that weapons were being sold unlawfully at DSEI was supported by … detailed expert evidence.” The Crown Prosecution Service refused to accept this result, and are now trying to appeal, so the eight could yet find themselves dragged back to court. A joint statement from the eight defendants said: “We absolutely stand by our actions at the DSEI arms fair in seeking to prevent corporate and state support for torture and the mass indiscriminate killing of civilians.

“Our actions have continued to show where the interests of money and power truly lie. The state has invested a prolific amount of time and public money seeking to prosecute us.”

A more…

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Misery Breeds: How I Became a Wobbly by W.H. Glazer

The Organizer

I started working when I was sixteen. I grew up in Baltimore and had learned how to sail as a kid, so I managed to get myself a job working as a deckhand and sailing instructor at this fancy boat club on the Inner Harbor. It was a sweet fucking gig. I got to work outside on the water, there was free beer in the fridge, and I got paid A LOT of money. I was expecting to get paid minimum wage, so when the boss told me I’d be making nearly twice that, I was ecstatic. For a kid with relatively few expenses and a free bed at home, this was an absurd amount of money. So absurd, in fact, that I wouldn’t make anywhere close to it until two years after I graduated from college.

I moved to Minnesota for college in 2008, and had a number of…

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Day of action in support of Topshop two.

A spur of the moment protest in support of United Voices of the World union’s day of action against topshop, for their poverty wages and anti-union practices.

Dorset wobs assembled outside the shop at criterion arcade, in Bournemouth town centre with a couple of sheets of cardboard and proceeded to make placards; this attracted attention straight away. We hadn’t managed to get any leaflets printed in time so departed from the usual tactic of haranguing passers-by and pressing paper into their hands. Standing and walking around with our placards and banner we found people actually slowed down to read and engage with us rather than marching past with their heads down as usual. We had some interesting conversations and made some good contacts. We were later joined by comrades from Dorset Radical assembly.

The management was alerted to our presence when a punter returned the goods they had just bought, in protest, cops came and went. By the end of the day we had two new members. Our Hampshire group with Southampton Direct Action Initiative picketed the branch in Above Bar street simultaneously – and they had fliers!