Civil Liberties



Here's an extract from the diary I kept during the months leading up to my departure from Unison as the union's chief negotiator and Head of Local Government in Scotland.

The background is that I had resigned my membership of the Labour Party some weeks earlier much to the displeasure of some of my senior Unison colleagues, who seemed to think that my resignation was an act of disloyalty which deserved to be punished in some way.

The 'leak' to the Sunday Herald newspaper suggested that I would be disciplined for bringing Unison into disrepute, a laughable charge obviously as it was tantamount to saying that my employer was free to interfere with and ride roughshod over my civil liberties.

Back in 1999 Jim Devine was a Unison colleague (a senior regional officer) and although he has fallen from grace since, at the time Jim was very well connected within the Labour Party and acted as the election agent for Robin Cook MP who was Foreign Secretary in the last Labour Government between 1997 and 2001. 

Matt Smith was Unison's regional secretary in those days and I think it's fair to say he was not best pleased at the publicity my resignation from the Labour Party had received in the run up to the Scottish Parliament elections.

Wednesday 19 May 1999

At around 3pm I met a UNISON colleague, Jim Devine for a drink and to have a chat about a number of ongoing work issues. Jim told me that he had not seen the article from the Sunday Herald, but suspected it had been leaked by UNISON via a senior politician. He said that in the run up to the STUC Matt Smith had been contacted by Gordon Brown, Labour’s campaigns supremo during the elections, demanding that I be restrained. 


Now what puzzled me then, as now, is why Gordon Brown thought this was any of his business, as if the union was being run in the interests of the Labour Party rather than the interests of its members.  

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