Small Beer

When I wrote the post earlier about the sound and fury surrounding Stephen Hester's latest bonus payment - I hadn't scanned the newspapers to any great extent.

But predictably you can find a whole range of Britain's union bosses (the Bubs) - queueing up to condemn the whole business as 'disgusting', 'outrageous' and 'completely unacceptable'.

Yet what never ceases to amaze me is that the same effort was never put into highlighting another - much bigger scandal - that of equal pay for low paid council workers.

Many of the same union bosses presided over pay arrangements which cheated their women members out of tens of millions of pounds - hundreds of millions of pounds - over the years.

By comparison Stephen Hester's £963,000 bonus package is small beer - and simply pales into insignificance it has to be said.

But the Bubs choose to get worked up over one thing and not the other - which speaks volumes about their attitude towards equal pay.

To my mind it's easy to get worked up into a lather over something you don't control - because in many ways it's just playing to the gallery.

Yet when it came to equal pay many of these same unions just sat on their hands - and did nothing to help their women members.

Because it would have upset the big Labour councils and Labour government which ruled the roost at the time.

Now I suspect that most low paid women workers would have preferred - if offered the choice - for the Bubs to 'get out their pram' on an issue much closer to home - which directly affected tens of thousands of low paid council staff.

Instead of reserving their fury for a bonus paid to the the chief executive of RBS.