Sauce for the Goose

I laughed to myself the other day when I read that Unison was one lead complainers to the UK's media regulator Ofcom - over Jeremy Clarkson's comments about striking public sector workers.

See post dated 21 February 2012 - 'Much Ado About Nothing'.

Now the reason I laughed was two-fold.

Firstly, the effort put into this barking mad complaints campaign seems out of all proportion to the original incident. 

But what it does tell you is something about Unison's priorities - I haven't seen anything like as much effort being put into equal pay for example.

Equal pay is a much more important issue for many thousands of low paid council workers - as everyone knows.

Yet the unions have failed to hit the national headlines or cause anything like the kind of rumpus they created - over some silly remarks from the presenter of BBC's Top Gear.

In fact you could say that when it comes to equal pay - the unions have been in Reverse Gear rather than Top Gear.

The second point that made me laugh is the fact that a trade union is complaining to the UK media watchdog - Ofcom - when there is no similar system of regulation in place for trade unions themselves.

Trade unions are ever bigger these days - the big three (GMB, Unison and Unite) are all very similar in outlook and all support the Labour party - and there are more union mergers in the pipeline.

So these giant trade unions become increasingly remote from their members - yet there is no one there to stick up for the little guy, the ordinary union member - when things go wrong.

And what's sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander - it seems to me - and many other people as well - if my e-mail inbox is anything to go by.

The days of the police investigating complaints by themselves are long gone - the same should be true for the country's trade unions.