Glasgow - Equal Pay and Conspiracy Theories
Here's a topical post from the blog site archive featuring a Twitter exchange with James Dornan, SNP MSP for Glasgow Cathcart.
Like some other SNP supporters James seems to have bought into the completely bogus conspiracy theory that Glasgow's equal pay strike in October 2018 was bolstered by outsiders who were 'bussed in' especially for the event.
Yet none of Glasgow's MSPs or MPs came along to find out for themselves whether the strikers really were 'mindless sheep' - or whether the strike was crucial in persuading the City Council to get serious about the equal pay settlement negotiations.
Now I have no problem with the SNP - I am not a member or a dyed-in-the-wool supporter though it's fair to say I have given them my vote in recent elections.
So I do take exception to the conspiracy theorists in the SNP's ranks for trying to turn a perfectly legitimate industrial dispute, affecting thousands of low paid women workers, into a cynical party political bunfight.
Equal Pay and Conspiracy Theories (23/11/18)
I have never had James Dornan down as a conspiracy theorist, but the MSP for Glasgow Cathcart surprised me the other day with this Tweet in which he alleged that Glasgow's March and Rally in support of Equal Pay on 23 October 2018 - was bolstered by 'bussed in' activists.
Now I was there on the day, unlike Glasgow's MSP who all managed not to be present on the day even though it would have been a perfect opportunity to connect with their local constituents and see for themselves that this was a proper industrial dispute (about the lack of negotiations) and not a party political event.
I have to say I don't think that the MSPs absence was coincidental because A4ES staged a briefing session on the 'unfit for purpose' WPBR pay scheme back in February 2018 - yet not a single Glasgow constituency MSP came along to that event either.
James Dornan SNP
What would have been the point Mark? It was organised to voice concerns about things not being done when I was confident they were being done. The workers were fully entitled to march, not so sure what Labour Party members and bussed in activists had to do with it though
Mark Irvine
One point would have been to engage with the claimants who would have told you their event had nothing to do with party politics. Your presence would also have exposed the nonsense of 'bussed in' supporters - where do you get such tripe? https://action4equalityscotland.blogspot.com/2018/10/cybernuts-conspiracies-and-equal-pay.html …
Bogus 'Bussed Up' Conspiracy Theorists (21/11/19)
Just received the SNP's response to this story. No mention at all about expelling the councillor dailyrecord.co.uk/news/politics/…
27 people are talking about this
I wrote about this at the time because the original blog from 'Grouse Beater' (which Cllr Anderson shared) was published in October 2018 soon after the historic strike in Glasgow City Council over the ongoing fight for equal pay.
Now the 'Grouse Beater' blog was clearly antisemitic and resulted in the author being expelled from the SNP which was well deserved, but the piece also contained a vile conspiracy theory attack on the Glasgow strike, claiming that large numbers of supporters had been sent up from England.
At least one Glasgow MSP bought into this bogus 'bussed up' conspiracy theory which was, of course, nonsense from start to finish.
More to follow in the days ahead although my now views haven't changed from what I said at the time.
"Grouse Beater’s ugly rant about Glasgow’s equal pay dispute is idiotic on an epic scale - I think I’ll publish it on my blog because this kind of bullshit deserves to be exposed to a much wider audience. The Glasgow claimants will not be amused at being portrayed as mindless sheep."
Ugly, Hateful 'Cybernuts' (30/11/18)
I came across some really ugly stuff on Twitter the other day which I knew washing to blow pinto a much bigger story - here's what I had to say in a Tweet at the time.
"Grouse Beater’s ugly rant about Glasgow’s equal pay dispute is idiotic on an epic scale - I think I’ll publish it on my blog because this kind of bullshit deserves to be exposed to a much wider audience. The Glasgow claimants will not be amused at being portrayed as mindless sheep."
So here are the vile ramblings of some hateful soul who has so many chips on his shoulder it's difficult to know where to begin.
Among Grouse Beater's many complaints is that last week's March and Rally for Equal Pay in Glasgow was bolstered by a 'large number' of impostors from England which is, of course, the stuff of cranks and conspiracy theorists.
Yet instead of being challenged and condemned, GB's, anti-women, anti-Semitic and anti-trade union comments have been shared and retweeted by SNP councillors and SNP branches.
What a state of affairs and given that SNP supporters must know who this moron is - I hope they do the right thing by naming and shaming this individual in double quick time.
GMB – a Cockney Clique
Posted on October 28, 2018 by Grouse Beater
Somehow a wholly unnecessary strike turned into an elevation of Rhea Wolfson
The GMB union held a two day strike in Glasgow on behalf of equal pay for women. It is valuable to look at its motivation and what it achieved. They were paid up to £3 an hour less than council staff in male-dominated but broadly equivalent roles such as bin collecting and street sweeping. Some estimate they’re owed hundreds of millions of pounds in back pay.
There is nothing as bewildering than a union that holds to a tenuous belief in anarcho-syndicalism and yet regularly settles for a great deal less faced with employers it is affiliated to, such as the British Labour Party, the party that governed Glasgow for over twenty years.
You don’t demonstrate greater theatrical grandstanding than continuing to shout for equal pay long after it’s promised, scheduled for implementation. That’s essentially the cockamamie position of the anti-Scottish GMB, the General Municipal Boilermakers, whose officials command vast salaries and expenses while advocating equal pay for all.
What is the GMB?
It comes as no surprise to learn the GMB was born in East London late in the nineteenth century, an offshoot of the early Socialist Party. It has no historical association with Scotland, no record of intervention in any of Scotland’s great social-political upheavals or events, from the Clearances to Glasgow’s slum tenements.
The GMB is a Cockney clique that thinks Scotland should be North England in every respect, from its education system to the NHS and on to government. In that, the GMB is antagonistic to Scotland’s democratic ambitions. Readers will remember the GMB is often aided by UNISON. Both unions canvassed ruthlessly against Scottish independence in the 2014 referendum. Neither is a friend to Scotland’s constitutional or civil rights.
You cannot be a worker’s union and simultaneously campaign against full democratic rights. Both are cornerstones of democracy. Simply put, the GMB is another wing of the campaign to Bring Back the Great British Empire.
Demagoguery
The Glasgow women’s two-day strike was, in most part, organised by the GMB’s Scottish organiser Rhea Wolfson. She’s a budding demagogue. The former miners leader Arthur Scargill will recognise her style.
The hallmarks are classic, first cast yourself as the victim of abuse, either racist or political, garner press attention for yourself, then assume a messianic resolve to emerge unscathed, and after making the appearance of having achieved exactly that, portray yourself as a latter-day Joan of Arc. Press attention is paramount.
Wolfson is no stranger to political controversy. In 2016, she replaced Ken Livingstone on the Momentum slate for the NEC after he was suspended from the party. However, she experienced difficulties after failing to secure the nomination of her home CLP, as required by the rulebook. Wolfson blamed her former Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy for orchestrating her defeat. Ultimately, as reported by Labour List at the time, she changed her party membership from Eastwood to Almond Valley CLP (Livingston) and got onto the ballot paper.
The GMB shifts the blame
If the strike should have been about anything, it ought to have been about usurping the executive of the GMB for dereliction of duty and false representation.
In all her ranting and raving about equal pay in Glasgow not once did Wolfson remind the women losing two days wages that the GMB had sold them down the river on that very goal. Whenever equal pay is raised the GMB gets it wrong. The union is suing its former lawyers, Digby Brown, over the firm’s advice in North Lanarkshire’s equal pay dispute. That claim will drag on for many months placing claimants at a disadvantage.
Wolfson did her best to give the impression that Glasgow’s SNP run-council is obstructing a manifesto promise to settle 12,000 outstanding pay claims. “There had been 21 meetings this year but no meaningful progress” is a personal opinion, and an odd one set against a guaranteed resolution by the end of this year, 2018. You wonder how easy the GMB made agreement of complicated detail in discussions reassessing grades.
Wolfson failed to make clear to the public, as did the GMB, the fact that the previous Labour administration in Glasgow had spent an estimated £2,5 million in legal fees fighting against the implementation of equal rights for its council works. Labour burdened the incoming administration with huge debts. Wolfson’s entire motivation is embarrass the new SNP administration, as if it was the SNP who caused the strike. Wolfson’s idea of equality is decidedly lop-sided.
Raiding parties to the rescue
There is a strong rumour her GMB male colleagues advised against striking. It rings true. They almost certainly foresaw how it would backfire on the union because the public are so much better informed of the rights and wrongs of the dispute than before. Wolfson threw caution to the wind. She announced the strike in the following terms on the GMB website, and in so doing showed how little she cared about the school children and vulnerable adults affected:
“The strike will involve more than 2,000 GMB members who provide round the clock home care for 87,000 service users, as well as cleaning and catering services for schools and amenities across the city.”
In the event, an estimated 8,000 thousand people attended the rally, mostly woman, which sounds a success until the public learned a large number were sent from England.
Groups from ‘darn sarf’ were paid to attend with expenses paid. Expensive placards were handed out to all who attended, money that could have helped subsidise some of the women struggling to make ends meet. How many of the indigenous women were single mothers, and how many were married with working husbands is not known.
Hitler’s view
Fascist ideology hates unions. Fascists know unions are the very bedrock of democracy. Right-wing governments employ fascist language to undermine union representation, or quash it altogether.
A labour union is the chief mechanism by which a democracy guides the distribution of wealth at a local level. It’s function is to organise collective bargaining. Elected governments are meant to do the same job at a national level, but for wider social benefits such as sustaining infrastructure and institutions.
Trade unions are a source of cooperation and community. They exist to achieve wage equality. Their function is to protect workers against economic vicissitude. According to fascist policy – which we see arising everywhere in the UK and abroad – unions must be smashed to render workers isolated, prepared to accept whatever is offered.
In Part 1 of Mein Kampf Hitler attacks unions over an over again. Unions are fascism’s Public Enemy Number 1. He went further. He accused ‘The Jew’ of gradually assuming leadership of the trade union movement. Hitler wanted a blindly obedient fighting force loyal only to the national leader of government.
Whether or not Wolfson is intellectually aware of Hitler’s outlook is unknown but she is certainly commendably assiduous in condemning anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, however, Labour’s travails over its alleged anti-Semitism isn’t for this essay.
The current attack on unions
In the western society we see very successful attacks on unions by the power elite. We saw it in the Hollywood movie On the Waterfront, the loner beating the crooked union.
In the UK Thatcher squandered thousands of millions of pounds of Scotland’s North Sea oil on eradicating union influence, vastly reduced the scale of union activity, (aided by the right-wing British press) destroying worker’s livelihoods, breaking up families and communities, paying those made unemployed social security and unemployment benefits for the rest of their days … until now, that is. The Labour Party has no plans to roll back draconian union law.
We do not ostracise unions in Scotland, we encourage their participation, but note I am talking about indigenous unions not English orientated unions carrying the flag of British nationalism and its agenda.
In Scotland, the SNP government, and the SNP council in Glasgow did not attack the GMB once. Indeed, they supported the women to the hilt rendering a strike unnecessary.
As the leader of the council said, “The women won their case the minute the SNP were elected.” Susan Aitken, the patient SNP leader of Glasgow city council, said her administration “remained committed to agreeing a settlement with staff by the end of the year … and not any sort of lowball offer.”
You cannot get more committed to a cause or precise than that, and that is in the face of many millions of pounds – some say a billion, needed to finance equal pay.
Tammany Hall politics
The GMB’s response was to come clean about their private intentions. They didn’t want SNP support. “Glasgow council has no money, therefore the Scottish Government will have to pay up”, said one callous official.
This is the British nationalist way of thinking. Impose Tory economic policies on Scotland with the full support of the Labour Party, reduce Scotland’s annual grant to squeeze the SNP’s choice of how to spend it, and then demand the SNP government supply the difference from thin air. It is no better than the Mafia demanding money with menaces.
Wolfson stands accused of exploiting the women in the strike. She did not rail against the British state that undermines Scotland’s sovereignty, nor demand Scotland be allowed to keep what it earns to spend as it sees fit, or ask the UK Treasury to pay up. Those ideals are furthest from her thoughts. She made no mention that Richard Leonard Labour’s branch manager was a GMB official when the women were denied equal pay. That’s called rank dishonesty. She is part of a Labour Party that deleted Clause 4 in its Manifesto and in one fell swoop practically outlawed unions.
Equality of wages was already agreed. Wolfson created division when she should have created cohesion and a collaborative partnership. The women need better leadership. Wolfson turned an honourable goal into a giant hen party.
Without a conscience, she left many young and old vulnerable for the length of the strike. She lied when she and her colleagues said they had no choice, two months away from the first payments to the women involved. I am sad to say, in her contorted way, Wolfson’s voice is the stuff of fascist demagoguery.
Betraying the people of Glasgow
The people of Glasgow voted for independence without caveat. They did not invite fifth column English unionists to come to their city to divert that just ambition. The GMB betrays that clarion call with every utterance they make. The Labour Party and their affiliated unions show they a force against social progress.
In essence we’re dealing with a union that correctly demands equality of pay but not equality of civil rights in a sovereign nation. That is a preposterous stance to take.
What we saw in George Square, Glasgow, was Tammany Hall politics of Labour graft and union corruption, the legacy of a Labour administration.
A kind reader sent me this Tweet which was posted on the day of Glasgow's historic strike by 8,000 low paid workers in support of their fight for equal pay with Glasgow City Council.
ali @alibali50 - Oct 23
Apparently many of the marchers have been bussed up from England while the women actually affected are sitting at home being exploited by their aggressors. We all know the ££ situation SNP found Glasgow CC in - this behaviour & cost may delay the settlement.
Now I've spent lots of time on Twitter in the past week patiently explaining that the strike and the wider equal pay campaign has nothing to do with party politics.
Somehow a wholly unnecessary strike turned into an elevation of Rhea Wolfson
The GMB union held a two day strike in Glasgow on behalf of equal pay for women. It is valuable to look at its motivation and what it achieved. They were paid up to £3 an hour less than council staff in male-dominated but broadly equivalent roles such as bin collecting and street sweeping. Some estimate they’re owed hundreds of millions of pounds in back pay.
There is nothing as bewildering than a union that holds to a tenuous belief in anarcho-syndicalism and yet regularly settles for a great deal less faced with employers it is affiliated to, such as the British Labour Party, the party that governed Glasgow for over twenty years.
You don’t demonstrate greater theatrical grandstanding than continuing to shout for equal pay long after it’s promised, scheduled for implementation. That’s essentially the cockamamie position of the anti-Scottish GMB, the General Municipal Boilermakers, whose officials command vast salaries and expenses while advocating equal pay for all.
What is the GMB?
It comes as no surprise to learn the GMB was born in East London late in the nineteenth century, an offshoot of the early Socialist Party. It has no historical association with Scotland, no record of intervention in any of Scotland’s great social-political upheavals or events, from the Clearances to Glasgow’s slum tenements.
The GMB is a Cockney clique that thinks Scotland should be North England in every respect, from its education system to the NHS and on to government. In that, the GMB is antagonistic to Scotland’s democratic ambitions. Readers will remember the GMB is often aided by UNISON. Both unions canvassed ruthlessly against Scottish independence in the 2014 referendum. Neither is a friend to Scotland’s constitutional or civil rights.
You cannot be a worker’s union and simultaneously campaign against full democratic rights. Both are cornerstones of democracy. Simply put, the GMB is another wing of the campaign to Bring Back the Great British Empire.
Demagoguery
The Glasgow women’s two-day strike was, in most part, organised by the GMB’s Scottish organiser Rhea Wolfson. She’s a budding demagogue. The former miners leader Arthur Scargill will recognise her style.
The hallmarks are classic, first cast yourself as the victim of abuse, either racist or political, garner press attention for yourself, then assume a messianic resolve to emerge unscathed, and after making the appearance of having achieved exactly that, portray yourself as a latter-day Joan of Arc. Press attention is paramount.
Wolfson is no stranger to political controversy. In 2016, she replaced Ken Livingstone on the Momentum slate for the NEC after he was suspended from the party. However, she experienced difficulties after failing to secure the nomination of her home CLP, as required by the rulebook. Wolfson blamed her former Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy for orchestrating her defeat. Ultimately, as reported by Labour List at the time, she changed her party membership from Eastwood to Almond Valley CLP (Livingston) and got onto the ballot paper.
The GMB shifts the blame
If the strike should have been about anything, it ought to have been about usurping the executive of the GMB for dereliction of duty and false representation.
In all her ranting and raving about equal pay in Glasgow not once did Wolfson remind the women losing two days wages that the GMB had sold them down the river on that very goal. Whenever equal pay is raised the GMB gets it wrong. The union is suing its former lawyers, Digby Brown, over the firm’s advice in North Lanarkshire’s equal pay dispute. That claim will drag on for many months placing claimants at a disadvantage.
Wolfson did her best to give the impression that Glasgow’s SNP run-council is obstructing a manifesto promise to settle 12,000 outstanding pay claims. “There had been 21 meetings this year but no meaningful progress” is a personal opinion, and an odd one set against a guaranteed resolution by the end of this year, 2018. You wonder how easy the GMB made agreement of complicated detail in discussions reassessing grades.
Wolfson failed to make clear to the public, as did the GMB, the fact that the previous Labour administration in Glasgow had spent an estimated £2,5 million in legal fees fighting against the implementation of equal rights for its council works. Labour burdened the incoming administration with huge debts. Wolfson’s entire motivation is embarrass the new SNP administration, as if it was the SNP who caused the strike. Wolfson’s idea of equality is decidedly lop-sided.
Raiding parties to the rescue
There is a strong rumour her GMB male colleagues advised against striking. It rings true. They almost certainly foresaw how it would backfire on the union because the public are so much better informed of the rights and wrongs of the dispute than before. Wolfson threw caution to the wind. She announced the strike in the following terms on the GMB website, and in so doing showed how little she cared about the school children and vulnerable adults affected:
“The strike will involve more than 2,000 GMB members who provide round the clock home care for 87,000 service users, as well as cleaning and catering services for schools and amenities across the city.”
In the event, an estimated 8,000 thousand people attended the rally, mostly woman, which sounds a success until the public learned a large number were sent from England.
Groups from ‘darn sarf’ were paid to attend with expenses paid. Expensive placards were handed out to all who attended, money that could have helped subsidise some of the women struggling to make ends meet. How many of the indigenous women were single mothers, and how many were married with working husbands is not known.
Hitler’s view
Fascist ideology hates unions. Fascists know unions are the very bedrock of democracy. Right-wing governments employ fascist language to undermine union representation, or quash it altogether.
A labour union is the chief mechanism by which a democracy guides the distribution of wealth at a local level. It’s function is to organise collective bargaining. Elected governments are meant to do the same job at a national level, but for wider social benefits such as sustaining infrastructure and institutions.
Trade unions are a source of cooperation and community. They exist to achieve wage equality. Their function is to protect workers against economic vicissitude. According to fascist policy – which we see arising everywhere in the UK and abroad – unions must be smashed to render workers isolated, prepared to accept whatever is offered.
In Part 1 of Mein Kampf Hitler attacks unions over an over again. Unions are fascism’s Public Enemy Number 1. He went further. He accused ‘The Jew’ of gradually assuming leadership of the trade union movement. Hitler wanted a blindly obedient fighting force loyal only to the national leader of government.
Whether or not Wolfson is intellectually aware of Hitler’s outlook is unknown but she is certainly commendably assiduous in condemning anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, however, Labour’s travails over its alleged anti-Semitism isn’t for this essay.
The current attack on unions
In the western society we see very successful attacks on unions by the power elite. We saw it in the Hollywood movie On the Waterfront, the loner beating the crooked union.
In the UK Thatcher squandered thousands of millions of pounds of Scotland’s North Sea oil on eradicating union influence, vastly reduced the scale of union activity, (aided by the right-wing British press) destroying worker’s livelihoods, breaking up families and communities, paying those made unemployed social security and unemployment benefits for the rest of their days … until now, that is. The Labour Party has no plans to roll back draconian union law.
We do not ostracise unions in Scotland, we encourage their participation, but note I am talking about indigenous unions not English orientated unions carrying the flag of British nationalism and its agenda.
In Scotland, the SNP government, and the SNP council in Glasgow did not attack the GMB once. Indeed, they supported the women to the hilt rendering a strike unnecessary.
As the leader of the council said, “The women won their case the minute the SNP were elected.” Susan Aitken, the patient SNP leader of Glasgow city council, said her administration “remained committed to agreeing a settlement with staff by the end of the year … and not any sort of lowball offer.”
You cannot get more committed to a cause or precise than that, and that is in the face of many millions of pounds – some say a billion, needed to finance equal pay.
Tammany Hall politics
The GMB’s response was to come clean about their private intentions. They didn’t want SNP support. “Glasgow council has no money, therefore the Scottish Government will have to pay up”, said one callous official.
This is the British nationalist way of thinking. Impose Tory economic policies on Scotland with the full support of the Labour Party, reduce Scotland’s annual grant to squeeze the SNP’s choice of how to spend it, and then demand the SNP government supply the difference from thin air. It is no better than the Mafia demanding money with menaces.
Wolfson stands accused of exploiting the women in the strike. She did not rail against the British state that undermines Scotland’s sovereignty, nor demand Scotland be allowed to keep what it earns to spend as it sees fit, or ask the UK Treasury to pay up. Those ideals are furthest from her thoughts. She made no mention that Richard Leonard Labour’s branch manager was a GMB official when the women were denied equal pay. That’s called rank dishonesty. She is part of a Labour Party that deleted Clause 4 in its Manifesto and in one fell swoop practically outlawed unions.
Equality of wages was already agreed. Wolfson created division when she should have created cohesion and a collaborative partnership. The women need better leadership. Wolfson turned an honourable goal into a giant hen party.
Without a conscience, she left many young and old vulnerable for the length of the strike. She lied when she and her colleagues said they had no choice, two months away from the first payments to the women involved. I am sad to say, in her contorted way, Wolfson’s voice is the stuff of fascist demagoguery.
Betraying the people of Glasgow
The people of Glasgow voted for independence without caveat. They did not invite fifth column English unionists to come to their city to divert that just ambition. The GMB betrays that clarion call with every utterance they make. The Labour Party and their affiliated unions show they a force against social progress.
In essence we’re dealing with a union that correctly demands equality of pay but not equality of civil rights in a sovereign nation. That is a preposterous stance to take.
What we saw in George Square, Glasgow, was Tammany Hall politics of Labour graft and union corruption, the legacy of a Labour administration.
'Cybernuts', Conspiracies and Equal Pay (29/10/18)
A kind reader sent me this Tweet which was posted on the day of Glasgow's historic strike by 8,000 low paid workers in support of their fight for equal pay with Glasgow City Council.
ali @alibali50 - Oct 23
Apparently many of the marchers have been bussed up from England while the women actually affected are sitting at home being exploited by their aggressors. We all know the ££ situation SNP found Glasgow CC in - this behaviour & cost may delay the settlement.
Now I've spent lots of time on Twitter in the past week patiently explaining that the strike and the wider equal pay campaign has nothing to do with party politics.
But some 'Cybernuts' simply refuse to believe anything other than their own ridiculous conspiracy theories and what a doozy this one is - that many Glasgow equal pay marchers were actually impostors who were bussed up from England to discredit the SNP!
What an insult to the thousands of women and men who went on strike last week and if you ask me, this kind of barmy comment does the SNP a great deal of harm.
What an insult to the thousands of women and men who went on strike last week and if you ask me, this kind of barmy comment does the SNP a great deal of harm.
