‘OSTEOARTHRITIS OF THE KNEES’
 
ARE YOU A MINER OR EX-MINER?
 
 
THIS DISEASE IS SOON TO BECOME CLASSIFIED AS AN INDUSTRIAL DISEASE UNDER THE GOVERNMENT’S DISABLEMENT BENEFIT
 
YOU DO NOT NEED SOLICITORS
 
ONCE IMPLEMENTED – YOU NEED ONLY TO TELEPHONE THE INDUSTRIAL INJURIES DISABLEMENT BENEFIT CENTRE
 
0845 7585433
 
AND ASK FOR A FORM TO CLAIM FOR OSTEOARTHRITIS OF THE KNEES IN MINERS (miners knee).  COMPLETE IT AND SEND IT BACK DIRECT TO THE IIDB CENTRE - YOU WILL THEN BE SENT FOR A MEDICAL
 
SOME SOLICITORS WILL TRY AND CHARGE YOU FOR THIS SERVICE
 
DO IT YOURSELF
FOR THE COST OF A LOCAL PHONE CALL

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Jack Jones, who led the Transport and General Workers' Union in the 1970s, has died at the age of 96.
His son Mick said Mr Jones died peacefully in a care home in Peckham, south London, on Tuesday evening.
Mr Jones was born in Liverpool and was general secretary of the TGWU from 1969 to 1978 at a time when it was one of the country's most powerful unions.
His son said: "He had all the care he could want. He was active until the very end and had a good innings."

Former TUC general secretary Norman Willis said Mr Jones was a "fighter" who would be fondly remembered.
"I worked with Jack in the T&G and through the TUC for many years. Jack Jones was a great fighter for ordinary people whether they were at work or unemployed or later as pensioners," he said.
"He never forgot the underdog and will be remembered with affection."
'True giant'
Mr Jones fought in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s and served as a Liverpool city councillor between 1936 and 1939.
He became a TGWU organiser in Coventry and worked his way up through the union to become general secretary. He was on the Labour Party's policy-forming National Executive Committee from 1964 to 1967.
Mr Jones, who turned down a peerage, continued his campaigning - for pensioners' rights - after retirement from his union post.
TUC general secretary Brendan Barber said Mr Jones was a "true giant of the Labour movement".
"He was a passionate internationalist showing raw courage on the battlefields of the Spanish Civil War," he said.
"After his working life as a trade unionist, he became a champion for pensioners, holding ministers to account without fear or favour and urging governments to deliver dignity to the elderly."
IAN LAVERY NUM President said "Jack Jones was a trade unionist of immense stature, he served working people and pensioners with distinction all his life.  He was a tireless and selfless worker for the underdog and can never be replaced.  The NUM salutes him and mourns his loss"
Please leave your own tributes in the Guest Book which can be found on the left hand menu.

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Here is Alice Mahon's resignation letter to her constituency secretary Martin Burton.Dear Martin, I am resigning as a member of the Labour Party and I wanted the local party to know before I make my decision public. First, I would like to thank you and my friends in the party for your comradeship and support over the years. This has been a difficult decision to take as I feel I was almost born into the Labour Party. However, I can no longer be a member of a party that at the leadership level has betrayed many of the values and principles that inspired me as a teenager to join. You will recall when I stood down I said that after the illegal decision to wage war on Iraq I could not have served another term under Tony Blair's leadership. With hindsight I should have resigned then, but I thought this would be very unfair to Linda Riordan and labour members putting themselves forward for election to the council. I also hoped that we might go back to being a really progressive and caring party should Gordon Brown succeed Tony Blair as leader. In the event I could not have been more wrong. Despite all the evidence and in the face of the credit crunch, Gordon Brown's obsession with privatisation such as the Royal Mail is inexplicable and quite simply wrong. Labour had its chance after Blair to get its finger on the pulse in the country, more social justice not less.That chance was squandered with catastrophic results. He has shown not one jot of contrition as he continues to privatise what is left of our public services. At the same time he has failed miserably to tackle the corporate greed of the bankers. As to foreign affairs, it becomes clearer by the day that the Labour Government cooperated with the Bush regime as they rendered whoever they judged to be guilty of terrorism to despotic regimes who tortured them and offered them no access to the legal process whatsoever. Our ministers shame us in front of the world when they give their support to the Israeli government as they commit war crimes in Palestine and the Lebanon. Brown has just announced plans to send another 900 troops to Afghanistan, billions to be spent on an unwinnable war and pensioners dare not turn on their heating because this Labour Government will not tackle the energy fat cats. On the domestic front we said in our 2005 manifesto that we would not privatise Royal Mail, we lied. That same manifesto promised a referendum on the European Constitution, we re-named it the Lisbon Treaty and reneged on that promise also. If this Treaty is ratified we can say goodbye to any publicly owned services. Article 111-147 is clear, we will be handing over to private corporations, social services, education, transport and postal services. Even the NHS will be up for grabs. The misnamed Welfare Reform Bill now going through parliament is something the Poor Law Guardians would have been proud of. This Labour Government should hang its head in shame for inflicting this on the British public just as we face the most severe recession any of us have experienced in a lifetime. This assault on the poor and disabled is taking place at a time when former Labour Ministers still drawing an MPs salary, line up on an unprecedented scale to take up lucrative consultancies with private companies, that as ministers they previously had dealings with. I have written to Gordon Brown about this, he simply passed me on to a civil servant. This personal greed and possible conflict of interest did not appear to concern him. My final reason for leaving the party is because it is no longer democratic. The personally vindictive, dishonest campaign played out on the pages of the tabloids by certain Labour party members to deselect Janet Oosthuysen was despicable, but even more shaming was the behaviour of the NEC who have uttered not one word of criticism about the Home Secretary's behaviour on expenses, but have ruined the political career of an excellent candidate whose only crime was to scratch her ex partner's car. The undemocratic nature of that selection continues as the reselection has been conducted without much transparency and is now subject to complaints from members of the Calder Valley Party. Quite simply I have had it with New Labour. Yours in friendship, Alice.

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ARE YOU BEING LIED TO ABOUT PIRATES?
 
(from OPEDnews.com)
 
 
Who imagined that in 2009, the world’s governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates?
 
 
Recently, the British Royal Navy - backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the U.S. to China - sailed into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth.
 
But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labelling as “one of the great menaces of our times” have an extraordinary story to tell - and some justice on their side.
 
Pirates have never been quite who we think they are. In the “golden age of piracy” - from 1650 to 1730 - the idea of the pirate as the senseless, savage thief that lingers today was created by the British government in a great propaganda heave. Many ordinary people believed it was false: Pirates were often rescued from the gallows by supportive crowds. Why? What did they see that we can’t?
 
In his book “Villains of All Nations,” the historian Marcus Rediker pores through the evidence to find out. If you became a merchant or navy sailor then - plucked from the docks of London’s East End, young and hungry - you ended up in a floating wooden Hell. You worked all hours on a cramped, half-starved ship, and if you slacked off for a second, the all-powerful captain would whip you with the cat o’ nine tails. If you slacked consistently, you could be thrown overboard. And at the end of months or years of this, you were often cheated of your wages.
 
Pirates were the first people to rebel against this world. They mutinied against their tyrannical captains - and created a different way of working on the seas. Once they had a ship, the pirates elected their captains, and made all their decisions collectively. They shared their bounty out in what Rediker calls “one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition of resources to be found anywhere in the 18th century.”
 
They even took in escaped African slaves and lived with them as equals. The pirates showed “quite clearly - and subversively - that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal navy.” This is why they were popular, despite being unproductive thieves.
 
The words of one pirate from that lost age - a young British man called William Scott - should echo into this new age of piracy. Just before he was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina, he said: “What I did was to keep me from perishing. I was forced to go a-pirating to live.”
 
In 1991, the government of Somalia - in the Horn of Africa - collapsed. Its 9 million people have been teetering on starvation ever since - and many of the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country’s food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.
 
Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died.
 
Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the U.N. envoy to Somalia, tells me: “Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury - you name it.” Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to “dispose” of cheaply. When I asked Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: “Nothing, there has been no cleanup, no compensation and no prevention.”
 
At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia’s seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish stocks by over-exploitation - and now we have moved on to theirs. More than 0 million worth of tuna, shrimp, lobster and other sea life is being stolen every year by vast trawlers illegally sailing into Somalia’s unprotected seas.
 
The local fishermen have suddenly lost their livelihoods, and they are starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: “If nothing is done, there soon won’t be much fish left in our coastal waters.”
 
This is the context in which the men we are calling “pirates” have emerged. Everyone agrees they were ordinary Somalian fishermen who at first took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least wage a “tax” on them. They call themselves the20Volunteer Coast Guard of Somalia - and it’s not hard to see why.
 
In a surreal telephone interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali, said their motive was “to stop illegal fishing and dumping in our waters … We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas.” William Scott would understand those words.
 
No, this doesn’t make hostage-taking justifiable, and yes, some are clearly just gangsters - especially those who have held up World Food Program supplies. But the “pirates” have the overwhelming support of the local population for a reason. The independent Somalian news site WardherNews conducted the best research we have into what ordinary Somalis are thinking - and it found 70 percent “strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defense of the country’s territorial waters.”
 
During the revolutionary war in America, George Washington and America’s founding fathers paid pirates to protect America’s territorial waters, because they had no navy or coast guard of their own. Most Americans supported them. Is this so different?
Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our nuclear waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We didn’t act on those crimes - but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit corridor for 20 percent of the world’s oil supply, we begin to shriek about “evil.”
 
If we really want to deal with piracy, we need to stop its root cause - our crimes - before we send in the gunboats to root out Somalia’s criminals.
 
The story of the 2009 war on piracy was best summarized by another pirate, who lived and died in the fourth century BC. He was captured and brought to Alexander the Great, who demanded to know “what he meant by keeping possession of the sea.” The pirate smiled and responded: “What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you, who do it with a great fleet, are called emperor.”
 
Once again, our great imperial fleets sail in today - but who is the robber?
 
Postscript: Some commentators seem bemused by the fact that both toxic dumping and the theft of fish are happening in the same place - wouldn’t this make the fish contaminated? In fact, Somalia’s coastline is vast, stretching 3,300km (over 2,000 miles). Imagine how easy it would be - without any coast guard or army - to steal fish from Florida and dump nuclear waste on California, and you get the idea. These events are happening in different places but with the same horrible effect: death for the locals and stirred-up piracy. There’s no contradiction.
 
by Johann Hari 

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Kitty Ussher MP announced on Wednesday 15th April 2009 at Caphouse Mining Museum that the Government had accepted the Industrial Injuries Advisor Council report in full on osteoarthritis of the Knee and will later this year be putting it before Parliament to make osteoarthritis of the knee and industrial disease for mineworkers.

CHRIS KITCHEN NUM National Secretary welcomed Ms Ussher’s remarks saying “This is a substantial success for the hard work done by the NUM in respect of this crippling disease.”
The IIAC report on osteoarthritis of the knee recommends coverage for:
“Work for ten years or more in aggregate in any combination of any of the following occupations:
 
a)      before 1986 as an underground coal miner ; or
 
b)      After 1985, as:
 
i)        A faceworker working non-mechanised coal faces, or
 
ii)   A development worker or conveyor belt cleaner or attendant.
 
A non-mechanised coal face is a face with neither powered roof supports nor a power loader machine which simultaneously cuts and loads coal.”
 
To view the full document, click the link below.
http://www.iiac.org.uk/pdf/command_papers/Cm7440.pdf

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