Month: April 2023

Unite said about 100 workers at the Fife yard employed by contractor Kaefer supported industrial action.

The union said workers were prepared to strike for 12 weeks to “get a decent wage rise”.

It claimed it would threaten progress on the £1.25bn frigate contract at the Babcock-owned yard.

About 98.4% of workers backed strike action. These include painters, cleaners, scaffolders and support service strike.

Unite said they would down tools between 17 April and 10 July.

After they announced plans to strike, staff were offered a below-inflation pay rise of 7.2%, which was rejected.

Regional industrial officer Bob MacGregor claimed the company refused to make any offer for months, then “panicked following the strike vote”.

He said: “Kaefer in turn are blaming Babcock who own the yard for this situation but it’s a mess they have jointly created.

“It’s a really shoddy way of managing industrial relations at Rosyth.

“The imminent strike action will have a knock-on effect for the Type 31 contract, and it will undoubtedly lead to significant delays.”

The Royal Navy has ordered five Type 31 frigates, which are known as the Inspiration class. The 139m long vessels will carry 107 crew.

HMS Venturer is the first set to be built, followed by Active, Formidable, Bulldog and Campbeltown.

A Babcock spokesman said: “We are aware of the situation between Kaefer and their Unite members and will work with our sub-contractor to mitigate any impacts to our Rosyth operations.”

A spokesman for Kaefer said: “We continue to support constructive dialogue between Unite and Kaefer to reach a mutually acceptable resolution.

“The safety of our teams remains paramount and will not be affected by any potential industrial action.”

They are fleeing from Shwe Kokko town, controlled by a pro-military militia and home to Chinese-owned casinos.

This is one of the largest cross-border movements of people since a military coup two years ago.

The military has not released a statement yet about the fighting.

It is the latest in a civil war that has been raging since the coup in February 2021. Two years on, the military government has failed to impose its authority on large areas of the country. It is battling established ethnic armed groups in border areas that have been at war with the military for decades, and recently-formed anti-coup militias that call themselves People’s Defence Forces (PDFs) in much of the rest of the country.

Many thousands of people have been killed and some 1.4 million have been displaced since the coup. Nearly one third of the country’s population is in need of aid, according to the United Nations.

The latest fighting broke out after the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) and its allies launched attacks on military outposts and a gate camp near Shwe Kokko on Wednesday. More than 80 people have been killed on both sides, KNLA told BBC Thai.

Aid workers in the border regions – Thailand’s Mae Sot and Mae Ramat areas – have called for urgent humanitarian assistance as refugees seek shelter in schools, monasteries and rubber farms.

“In the long run, we need more donors,” said Kay Thi Htwe, a Burmese volunteer at a monastery in Mae Sot, which is hosting 500 refugees.

The KNLA has also closed the Myawaddy-Kawkareik Asia highway – one of the main roads to the border – for two weeks starting Friday.

Back in Shwe Kokko, the military-aligned Border Guard Forces which controls the enclave is protecting the casinos and warning residents to stay indoors.

This comes as the military continues to crush civilian resistance, targeting schools, clinics and villages.

Earlier this week, the military said it had arrested 15 teachers who had been giving online classes for a school backed by the exiled National Unity Government (NUG).

The teachers were taken from their homes in Mandalay, Saigang and Magway, a member of the General Strike Committee of Basic Education Workers told the BBC. In July, about 30 teachers were reportedly arrested because they worked for an NUG-recognised online school.

From the start, education has been a battleground in Myanmar. Teachers were among the first, along with health-workers, to walk out in protest against the coup, and were in the front line of the huge protests called by the Civil Disobedience Movement in the first weeks after the military takeover.

When that was crushed, most still refused orders by the military junta that they should return to work, and in May 2020 around 150,000 teachers and university lecturers were dismissed from their jobs. Many decided to go underground, joining schools and clinics in areas where communities had begun an armed struggle against military rule.

The military views the establishment of independent schools and clinics as an existential threat. Official figures suggest the number of students taking the 10th grade matriculation exam in state-run schools is now only one fifth of the number doing so before the coup. Teachers working outside the state sector have been branded as terrorists.

The military said the attacks were a response to a barrage of 34 rockets fired from Lebanon into northern Israel on Thursday, which it blamed on Hamas.

Militants in Gaza fired dozens more rockets after the strikes began.

Tensions are high following two nights of Israeli police raids at the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem earlier this week.

The raids triggered violent confrontations with Palestinians inside the mosque, which is Islam’s third holiest site, and caused anger across the region.

Hamas did not say that it fired the rockets from Lebanon, which was the biggest such barrage in 17 years.

But its leader Ismail Haniyeh, who was visiting Beirut at the time, said Palestinians would not “sit with their arms crossed” in the face of Israeli aggression.

Overnight, there were two or three explosions around the Rashidieh Palestinian refugee camp, 5km (3 miles) south of the Lebanese coastal city of Tyre.

Lebanese media also reported strikes on the outskirts of the village of al-Qulaila, another 4km further south. Photographs appeared to show that a small bridge was destroyed.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) tweeted that its warplanes struck “terrorist infrastructures belonging to Hamas” in Lebanon.

“The IDF will not allow the Hamas terrorist organization to operate from within Lebanon and hold the state of Lebanon responsible for every directed fire emanating from its territory,” it warned.

Hamas said it strongly condemned “the blatant Zionist aggression against Lebanon in the vicinity of Tyre at dawn today [Friday]”.

In Gaza, more than 10 Hamas targets were hit, including a shaft for an underground site to construct weapons, three other weapons workshops and an underground “terrorist tunnel”, the IDF said.

During the strikes, at least 44 rockets were fired from Gaza towards southern Israel, Israeli media reported.

Most were intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome defence system or fell in open areas, but at least one house in the city of Sderot was hit.

There were no immediate reports of any casualties from either the strikes or the overnight rocket fire.

A man was injured by shrapnel in northern Israel on Thursday afternoon as a result of the rocket fire from Lebanon. The Israeli military said 25 of the 34 rockets were intercepted, but that five hit Israeli territory.

In the north-western border town of Shlomi, the rockets left craters in the road, and damaged vehicles and a bank. A car was also damaged in the village of Fassuta.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised that Israel’s response would “exact a significant price from our enemies”.

An Israeli military spokesman said it believed Hamas was behind the attack and that it was possible the militant group Islamic Jihad was also involved.

He added that they assumed the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, which fought a month-long war with Israeli in 2006, knew about the attack, and they suspected there was also Iranian involvement.

The attack came hours after Hezbollah, which controls much of southern Lebanon, said it would support “all measures” taken by Palestinians “to protect worshippers and the al-Aqsa mosque and to deter the enemy from continuing its attacks”.

Lebanon’s Prime Minister, Najib Mikati, condemned any military operations its territory that “destabilise the situation”.

The Lebanese Army said the rockets were launched in the vicinity of al-Qulaila and two other border villages near Tyre – Maaliya and Zibqine.

It posted photos of launchpads and a number of unlaunched rockets that it said troops had found in al-Qulaila, Zibqine and further east, near Marjayoun.

The new first minister made a bid for understatement of the year inside his opening week in office.

And he already has a stack of other issues piling up in his in-tray, with MSPs bickering about the SNP’s partnership with the Greens and a looming legal deadline in the row over Holyrood’s gender reforms.

How will these pressures weigh on the new SNP leader and first minister, and what could it all mean for Scotland going forward?

Following on from almost 20 years of stability under Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon, perhaps the SNP was always destined for period of turmoil.

But the speed and scale of the meltdown in the wake of Ms Sturgeon’s departure has still shocked almost everyone in Scottish politics.

The leadership race itself was remarkably fiery, with serving finance secretary Kate Forbes torching her party’s record in government and Ash Regan claiming it had gone soft on independence.

Mr Yousaf was unashamedly the Sturgeon continuity candidate, but even he embraced the need for sweeping changes at SNP HQ following the resignation of chief executive Peter Murrell, who took responsibility for misleading the media over membership figures.

The new leader said that one of his first tasks would be to “get up to speed very quickly on the financial health of the party”, with a transparency review to be carried out.

But it was the review by Police Scotland which came to the fore in spectacularly public fashion.

Precisely which part of the party’s books are of interest to the police remains fairly opaque, and in any case it would be foolish to speculate when their investigation is live.

But it underlines the need for Mr Yousaf to get to grips with the governance of his party.

The fall in membership subscriptions will have real financial implications, for all that nobody other than Mr Murrell will admit to having known about it.

And senior members have been raising questions about internal issues for some time. MP Douglas Chapman quit as Treasurer in 2021, saying he had not been given enough information to do the job; days later Joanna Cherry also left the National Executive Committee claiming she was unable to improve transparency and scrutiny.

Following his first NEC meeting on Saturday, Mr Yousaf said there were “lessons to be learned”, and that the party’s internal structures needed to carry the confidence of members and reflect the party’s “broad tent” approach.

If there is much to be done in-house at SNP HQ, there is also the issue of bringing the party’s representatives back together in parliament.

Mr Yousaf failed to tempt Ms Forbes back into the cabinet with the offer of a demotion. Keith Brown – elected deputy leader of the SNP by members – also left the top team, while two other ministers turned down jobs in his administration.

There are some unhappy faces on the SNP’s back benches, and after decades of iron discipline they are no longer shy about speaking out. A former cabinet secretary, Fergus Ewing, appears to be openly campaigning against his party’s partnership with the Greens.

This kind of rebellious talk is the sort of thing Nicola Sturgeon never had to contend with – at least not until the final months of her reign, and the row over gender reform.

And that too is a looming issue for Mr Yousaf.

Ms Sturgeon’s team had hoped to put the issue to bed with a series of marathon parliamentary sessions in December, when MSPs passed the Gender Recognition Reform Bill.

But then the UK government blocked the legislation in an unprecedented show of constitutional muscle.

Mr Yousaf has all but promised to challenge that veto in the courts, and the Greens have been clear they will quit the government if he does not.

The deadline for launching a judicial review is due in the coming weeks.

So before he even gets to his second Holyrood question session, Mr Yousaf will have to contemplate a courtroom showdown on a contentious issue which has already split his party.

Broadly, so far we have been talking about internal issues for the SNP. But there is clearly an external political impact too.

The image of that blue police tent being erected in Nicola Sturgeon’s drive was beamed out on TV and smartphone screens across the country.

What could that mean for her oft-cited legacy of electoral domination?

Opposition groups have certainly detected an opportunity. Labour in particular are openly licking their chops and demanding the country go to the polls.

You can barely turn a street corner in Scotland these days without tripping over Sir Keir Starmer or Anas Sarwar.

Professor Sir John Curtice says the four polls since Ms Sturgeon quit suggest that support for the SNP has “eased significantly”, despite the fact backing for independence has not slipped.

He told the BBC’s Good Morning Scotland programme that those votes are “primarily going to the Labour Party”, with the SNP’s lead over their red rivals having halved since February.

Sir John also suggested that Mr Yousaf was not proving as popular with the public as some in the SNP had hoped, and that his association with the Sturgeon regime may now prove a hindrance rather than an asset.

Polls are of course just polls – momentary snapshots of a carefully weighted slice of public opinion.

We may well have a much more tangible test in the coming months though, on account of something else that happened during Mr Yousaf’s first week in office.

Margaret Ferrier, the MP for Rutherglen and Hamilton South, is facing a 30-day suspension from the House of Commons for breaking Covid rules – and thus potentially a recall petition and by-election.

Ms Ferrier now sits as an independent, but won the seat for the SNP with a majority of 9.7% in 2019. Having changed hands at the last three elections, it was already a key target for Labour.

Should a contest come about, both the SNP and Labour will be absolutely desperate to win, and establish real electoral momentum.

If Labour can take the seat, Sir Keir will paint it as the first step on the road to Downing Street. If the SNP hold it, then Mr Yousaf can say he’s steadied the ship and could continue Ms Sturgeon’s run of extraordinary electoral success.

For all the talk of momentum, though, the next Holyrood election is not due until 2026. There may not be a general election until the start of 2025.

So for all the challenges which undoubtedly face Mr Yousaf, he does have some time to get to grips with the job and put his own stamp on the Scottish government.

We should also remember that he was the choice of the bulk of SNP parliamentarians, with by far the most endorsements, and was always the candidate best-placed to reunite the party.

Politics moves incredibly fast in this digital age. Never mind a week being a long time in politics, narratives can change overnight – for better or for worse.

Humza Yousaf has been around Scottish politics long enough to know that better than most. He said he felt like the “luckiest man in the world” when he became SNP leader, and for all the blows which followed he will not have felt his luck has run out just yet.

But he will be under no illusions that there may well be more “difficult days” ahead too.