Fighting fire Firefighters and local residents across London joined forces against the London Fire Authorities plan to cut the number of tire engines by ten across London.
Hundreds of firefighters protested on March 17 outside City Hall to hear speakers as diverse as Liberal Bermondsey MP Simon Hughes, Jeremy Corbyn and Respect's George Galloway all condemn plans to reduce fire cover in London when the city is growing massively.
Sadly, the protest was not enough to stop the proposals which were voted through with only one voting against, the Greens Darren Johnson.
One local resident suggested community groups should blockade the fire stations to prevent the engines being removed. Kathy Lowe BBC unions are threatening to ballot for strike action unless the corporation halts plans for devastating job losses.
Leaders of BECTU, the NUJ and AMICUS agreed joint action on 23 March, after BBC director general Mark Thompson announced he was axing 19 per cent of the BBC'S UK public service workforce in a bid to save £355m a year by 2008.
He unveiled job cuts totalling 3,780 from news sport and drama and from professional services departments such as legal, human resources and marketing. By the time the sell-offs of the Broadcasting and Resources commercial subsidiaries are complete staffing levels are expected to have been reduced by 6,000.
Mark Thompson had already announced last December that BBC Sport, New Media, Children's TV and radio would be moved to Manchester. As many staff will not wish to relocate, the unions fear that BBC bosses are bent on weakening unionisation by hiring new staff in Manchester on inferior or short-term contracts.
A key part of the Thompson plan is to contract out half of all the BBC's programmemaking to the independent sector - a sector marked by a growth in casualised labour, short-term contracts, poor training and a decline in equal opportunities.
Thompson's self-inflicted cuts are widely seen as an attempt to buy a reprieve from New Labour at a time when the BBC has come under intense pressure from the government over its reporting of the David Kelly affair and the Iraq war and from its commercial rivals over the renewal of its charter and licence fee.
The government's Green Paper on BBC Charter Renewal, published at the beginning of March, does indeed propose retaining the licence fee as a key source of funding for the next decade. But after that, as the media unions and media watchers well know, anything can happen.
New Labour has overseen a massive expansion of underregulated commercial broadcasting. Its Broadcasting Act, which took effect last year, scrapped all controls on foreign ownership of the UK media and opened the way to potential domination of the airwaves by big US corporations.
Commercial enterprises in the broadcasting industry whose revenues are now huge (the Murdoch empire, other media corporations and sections of ITV, together with the larger independents) continue to howl for still more liberalisation.
The unions agree that the job losses at the BBC, if allowed to go ahead, will have a devastating impact not only on the lives of the staff affected but on the BBC's performance as the world's leading public broadcaster.
To defend the BBC and public service values in programming requires nothing less than the mobilisation of trade unionists throughout the media plus high-profile campaigning to publicise what's at stake.