Mark Irvine - Blogger, Campaigner, Organiser

A kind reader drew my attention to the following article which appeared in the Daily Record yesterday - a somewhat desperate appeal by Scottish Labour leader  - Johann Lamont - for the votes of trade union members. The laugh is that I've yet to hear Johann Lamont - or any other Labour MSP for that matter - say anything remotely supportive about the fight for equal pay in recent times - or the role played by the big Labour run councils which has been a disgrace in my opinion. For years Scotland's Labour-run councils - Glasgow, North Lanarkshire and South Lanarkshire - were guilty of widespread pay discrimination against the lowest paid council workers - the great majority of whom are women of course. Yet for years the trade unions in Scotland turned a blind eye to what was going on - they kept their low paid women members completely in dark - because union leaders didn't want to face up to what w...

I sent a letter by e-mail to the Scottish Labour Leader last Thursday - following Johann Lamont's pointed comments at First Minister's Questions. Having heard nothing for the past week - not even an acknowledgement - I think it's fair to share what I had to say with readers of the blog site in South Lanarkshire - and elsewhere. To my mind Scottish Labour's double standards are shameful and spectacular in equal measure - because while they have plenty to say about other people when it comes to Freedom of Information - party leaders turn a blind turn a blind eye when it suits their purpose. No wonder people get cynical about politics and politicians, but Scotland's voters get a chance to have their say - at next week's local council elections on 3rd May.  Johann Lamont, MSP Scottish Labour Leader Dear Johann Labour in South Lanarkshire Please find attached a copy of a letter I sent to the Labour leader of South Lanarkshire Council, Cllr E...

Lots of readers from North Lanarkshire have been in touch in recent days - because the council has now issued settlement offers - to some of the many council workers who have outstanding equal pay claims. But only to a relatively small number of men in predominantly male jobs - such as school janitors - a much greater number of women workers have been left deliberately out in the cold. The strange thing is that although these offers must have been approved by the relevant trade union - the trade unions appear to have nothing to say - by way of giving proper advice to their members. Apparently union members are being told that they have only seven days to accept the offer - or they are on their own - which  sounds very off-hand and unreasonable. Why should people be forced into making such an important decision - in such a short space of time - when this whole business has been dragging on for years?  Is North Lanarkshire Council l...

For some time I have believed that Ken Livingstone is the wrong Labour candidate to be running for Mayor of London. Everyone I know in London - who would otherwise be a natural Labour supporter - has deep misgivings about voting for the man - some have even said they won't support Ken under any circumstances. That's certainly my view - and if I had a vote I certainly wouldn't be casting it in Ken's favour - because he's a dud. Ken has been droning on for years about the need for more women - and more people from ethnic minority backgrounds - to occupy prominent positions in the Labour party.  Yet when push comes to shove - he doesn't step aside himself.  No, not a bit of it - Ken and his supporters find any old excuse for keeping their man in the ring - even though his sell by date was up long ago. The final nail in Ken's coffin might well have been driven in by Lord Alan Sugar - a well known Labour supporter - who has come out and said pu...

I wrote the other day about the spineless behaviour of the trade unions - at the Scotttish TUC in 1999.  And what do you know - I came across a diary I kept at the time - which explains how the trade unions betrayed their own members over the Private Finance Initiative (PFI). Now PFI was by far the hottest political issue of the day. Yet when push came to shove - union bosses pulled their punches and acted in the interests of the Labour party over PFI - with the first Scottish Parliament elections only weeks away.  Instead of standing up for their members and facing the Labour party down - union bosses did Gordon Brown's bidding - because they didn't want to rock any boats with an important election on the horizon in May 1999.    All this time later things look very different - the trade unions are a mere shadow of their former selves - while Gordon Brown proved not to be up to...

Here's an article I wrote for The Herald newspaper back in the year 2000 - which focuses on what I believe is an essentially corrupting relationship - between the Labour party and the trade unions. My objection to the Labour/union link - especially in Scotland - is that it has become completely dishonest and undemocratic - since union leaders, being almost entirely and sometimes slavishly pro-Labour, don't reflect or represent the views of ordinary union members. Which is what trade unions are supposed to do - they should should not become the industrial wing of the Labour party - because they take their eye off the ball, as we've seen all too clearly over equal pay. I resigned my membership of the Scottish Labour party in 1999 - in what many people regarded as a protest over PFI - and I have highlighted a section of The Herald article which explains the grubby deal that Scotland's union leaders did with Gordon Brow...

My jaw dropped last week - and not for the first time - when I read this story by Paul Hutcheon in the Sunday Herald. How low can you go? - was my immediate reaction. Because these big Labour-run councils behave as if they're a law unto themselves - they dream up reward schemes - which look like old-fashioned bonus payments to the rest of the population. Then the Labour run council has the brass neck to say that it's proud of their bonus schemes - even though the truth of what was going on was dragged out of North Lanarkshire Council - only after a hard fought Freedom of Information (FOI) request. Who do these peope think they are kidding? Not me, that's for sure - and it's just the same in Glasgow where the Labour council paid hundreds of thousands of pounds in 'top-up' payments to councillors - sitting on arm's length bodies or ALEOs. ALEOs such as Cordia to which thousands of Glasgow's home care and education staff were transferred - on...

The events of recent weeks have been completely tumultuous - life-changing in all probability, I suspect. The sudden death of my younger brother, Kevin, came like a bolt out of the blue - and since my last post on the blog site I have been to Canada (and back) - where family and friends said their final farewells to Kevin - following his fatal motorbike accident in Bolivia. Yet what started as a terrible tragedy - turned out to be a hugely positive, uplifting experience - which is not at all what I imagined. Because while there were tears of sadness, for sure - what shone through in the end were all the funny stories and happy memories - as people spoke from the heart of their friend and a life well-lived. At the packed celebration of Kevin's life in Whistler - instead of a minute's silence we had a really noisy, raucous minute of applause - which went do...

Kevin Irvine Spirit of Adventure Born: 12 August 1967 Died: 29 March 2012 Kevin John Irvine died on his beloved Buell motorbike in Bolivia on Thursday 29 March 2012 while undertaking a dream trip from Whistler in Canada to Tierra del Fuego, the archipelago off the southernmost tip of South America. Kevin left Scotland in 1989 on a family sponsorship scheme following in the footsteps of his  parents (Adam and Sheila Irvine) who emigrated to Canada in 1952 before returning to Glasgow some years later, where the Irvine family grew up.  Kevin went to the Glasgow Nautical College with dreams of travelling the world, but after two tours of duty he decided that a seafaring life was not for him, not what he expected, because he got to see so little of the exotic ports and locations where his ship dropped anchor. So being a resourceful, flexible young man, Kevin changed direction completely and afte...

Since Ed Miliband became leader of the Labour party - in September 2010 - the big three public sector trade unions (GMB, Unison and Unite) have poured £10 million of their members' money - into Labour coffers. To do so lawfully, the trade unions have to conduct a political fund ballot (PFB) - but only once every ten years - a process which very few ordinary union members bother to take part in. So the turnout is poor, dreadful in fact - in single figures. If I recall correctly the turnout in the last Unison PFB was only 8% of the total union membership - which means that 92% failed to return their ballot papers. To anyone interested in trade union democracy that is very worrying. Because 100% of union members who pay into the union's Political Fund at the time of the ballot - keep doing so once  the vote has taken place. Which means that the vote - or ballot - is completely unrepresentative. Now th...

A friend of mine sent me this joke - a friend born into the Jewish faith - a faith which he outgrew long ago. Nowadays my friend doesn't believe in the literal word of God as espoused in many different holy books - all the way from the Torah, the Bible, the Koran - and the Book of Mormon.  Although even that short list does not do justice to more ancient belief systems - which have gone out of fashion these days. But my friend can laugh and poke gentle fun at his own religious background - because what's important is not what people believe or say they believe - but how they live their lives and whether they are tolerant of others.   The Last Laugh A well known Anti-Semite, walks into a bar and is about to order a drink when he sees a guy close by wearing a Jewish cap/kippa, a prayer shawl/tzitzis, and traditional locks of hair/payos. He doesn't have to be an Einstein to know that this guy is Jewish. So he shouts over ...

Here's an article by the late Christopher Hitchens from 30 May 2005 - which lays bare the ugly political project that is George Galloway. Unmitigated Galloway Saddam's favorite MP goes to Washington Every journalist has a list of regrets: of stories that might have been. Somewhere on my personal list is an invitation I received several years ago, from a then-Labour member of parliament named George Galloway. Would I care, he inquired, to join him on a chartered plane to Baghdad? He was hoping to call attention to the sufferings of the Iraqi people under sanctions, and had long been an admirer of my staunch and muscular prose and my commitment to universal justice (I paraphrase only slightly). Indeed, in an article in a Communist party newspaper in 2001 he referred to me as "that great British man of letters" and "the greatest polemicist of our age." No thanks, was my reply. I had my own worries about the sanctions, but I had also already been on an ...