SOLOMON HUGHES highlights a 1995 Sunday Times story about the disappearance of ‘defecting Iraqi nuclear scientist.’ Even though the story was debunked, it was widely repeated across the mainstream press, creating the false – and deadly – narrative of Iraqi WMD that eventually led to war
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Prison officers need health and safety at work too
Working in a high-risk sector, prison officers’ calls for proper PPE must be heeded – and the POA will be fighting to ensure effective protection at work is delivered, writes MARK FAIRHURST
A prison officer in a prison
RUBY ALDEN GIBSON believes Scottish parliament has enough powers to curtail Westminster Labour’s savage attack on welfare
KEVIN DONNELLY reports from Monte Faudo and its annual remembrance of the region’s WWII partisan anti-fascist battles
The Trump government is seizing overseas students from their homes and campuses and even off the streets, with no legal grounds and no due process, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
As global fascism grows, ROGER McKENZIE urges the left to reclaim May Day’s revolutionary roots — not as an act of nostalgia, but as fuel for building a ‘community of resistance’ against exploitation and the rise of fascism
Our unions need to make a firm stand against so-called ‘defence spending’: the boss class say there’s no magic money tree — and there should be no magic mushroom cloud either, argues NATHAN HENNEBRY
KEITH FLETT revisits the 1978 origins of Britain’s May Day bank holiday — from Michael Foot’s triumph to Thatcher’s reluctant acceptance — as Starmer’s government dodges calls to expand our working-class celebrations
I HAVE warned on these pages many times that my members, front-line prison officers, custody officers and support grades working in the most hostile environment in western Europe, are at constant risk of serious harm from a system that consistently devalues their safety and security.
From reckless staff cuts by the last Tory government — leading to a loss of over 110,000 years of cumulative prison officer experience since 2010, and counting — to the prison service’s obsession with appeasing prisoners at all costs, POA members have long paid the price of their employer’s callous indifference to protecting its workers.
What employment rights can be more important than the right to be safe at work? Yet new figures reveal that assaults against prison staff have soared by 13 per cent over the past year to a record high, while serious assaults are up 12 per cent. Enough is enough!
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With privatisation badly failing prisoners and staff, MARK FAIRHURST insists Labour must stick to its insourcing pledge and bring prison maintenance back in-house
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