Half a million workers down tools over pay, jobs and working conditions
Protesters outside Downing Street, London, demonstrating against the new law on strikes
BRITAIN faces its biggest day of strike action in more than a decade today as up to half a million workers down tools over pay, jobs and working conditions.
Teachers, lecturers, civil servants and train and bus drivers are set to withdraw their labour simultaneously, as the fightback against more than a decade of Tory austerity gathers pace.
The TUC is holding events nationwide as part of its “protect the right to strike day” after ministers rushed “authoritarian and draconian” anti-worker legislation through the Commons on Monday night.
The union body demanded the government drop the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill, which is likely to face stiff opposition in the House of Lords, and instead “get round the table to negotiate in good faith on public-sector pay.”
Workers from Thames Water delivering a temporary water supply from a tanker
CAMPAIGNERS have welcomed Oxford City Council’s unanimous vote in favour of calling for Thames Water to be taken into public ownership following a motion to end water privatisation.
The motion, proposed by Green Party councillors Chris Jarvis and Lois Muddiman, will also see the council writing to the firm to request that its chief executive officer Sarah Bentley attend a meeting with them.
Since water was privatised in England in 1989, over £72 billion has been paid in dividends to privateer shareholders, while infrastructure has deteriorated.
According to the GMB union’s research, Thames Water lets 635 million litres of water leak out of its system every day, equivalent to leaving a hosepipe on for 73 years.
New research from artificial intelligence projects that global warming will hit the threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius somewhere between 2033 and 2035
Scientists have long known the world is running out of time to hit its international climate targets. Now, artificial intelligence has arrived at a similar conclusion.
An innovative new AI study finds that it will take about a decade for humanity to blow past its optimistic goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
That’s the same conclusion scientists have come to when using more conventional climate modeling techniques, but the AI research adds more evidence to the growing conviction among climate scientists and policy experts that the world is all but certain to overshoot the 1.5 C target (Climatewire, Nov. 11, 2022).
Policymakers are still striving to keep global warning well below 2 C, even if they overshoot the 1.5 C target. But even that goal is in danger, according to the AI study. It found that the 2 C threshold could approach even faster than previous research has predicted.
Government rule breaches are to blame for UK’s corruption nadir, says Transparency International
Image of Elmo and former Prime Minister Tory idiot Boris Johnson
openDemocracy’s revelations of corruption in UK public life have been cited in a damning new index that ranks perceptions of Britain’s transparency at an all-time low.
A ‘poll of polls’ by Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) found industry experts think the UK is more corrupt than ever.
The UK’s CPI score is based on data from eight independent sources including the Economist Intelligence Unit and the World Economic Forum, who surveyed experts and business executives for their views on abuses of public office for private gain and bribery in the UK.
Britain scored 73 this year, down from 78 in 2022, on a scale where zero means a country is perceived as highly corrupt and 100 means it is perceived as very clean. The NGO cited several pieces of journalism by openDemocracy as partial explanation for the slump, which saw the UK tumble in the global rankings from 11th to 18th.
They include revelations in November 2021 that former Tory Party treasurers appeared to be guaranteed peerages so long as they donated more than £3m to the party.
openDemocracy was cited as revealing four of these breaches, one of which involved the government keeping large payments to the former prime minister Boris Johnson and other ministers secret for up to eight months.
Last year, the Cabinet Office insisted it would radically overhaul an ‘Orwellian’ government unit, almost two years after openDemocracy first revealed that it was vetting Freedom of Information requests.
Only five of the 180 countries assessed by Transparency for the 2022 Index saw their year-on-year scores drop by five or more points. The UK (-5) was joined by World Cup 2022 host Qatar (-5), Myanmar (-5), Azerbaijan (-7), and Oman (-8).
The countries perceived to be the least corrupt were Denmark, Finland and New Zealand, while those ranked most corrupt were South Sudan, Syria and Somalia.
Transparency International acknowledged that most countries at the bottom of its index were either currently experiencing conflict or had recently done so. It added that although most Western European countries had been ranked higher than African, Asian and Middle Eastern countries, they in fact played a central role in fostering global corruption.
“For decades, they have welcomed dirty money from abroad, allowing kleptocrats to increase their wealth, power and destructive geopolitical ambitions,” the report said.
