Labour and Equal Pay

I listened to Ed Miliband at the Labour Party conference and here's what the Labour leader had to say on the subject of equal pay - a much bigger issue by the way than the bedroom tax or the row over zero hours contracts. 

"But to change our politics we have got to a lot more than that. We have got to hear the voices of people that haven’t been heard for a long time. I think about our young people, their talent, their energy, their voices. The voices of young people demanding a job, the voices of young people who demand that we shoulder and don’t shirk our responsibilities to the environment. The voices of gay and lesbian young people who led the fight and won the battle for equal marriage in Britain. And the voices of young people, particularly young women, who say in 2013 the battle for equality is not won. You see they are not satisfied that 33% of Labour MPs are women, they want it to be 50% and they are right. They are not satisfied that 40 years after the Equal Pay Act, we still do not have equal pay for work of equal value in this country. They are not satisfied and they are right." 

So that was it - just a few throwaway words - bereft of any commitment or insight into the fact that up and down the country the biggest obstacles to Equal Pay have been Labour run councils and Labour supporting unions.

Take Labour run South Lanarkshire Council - where the workforce has been kept in the dark for years and the truth is now being slowly dragged out into the open - only because of  Freedom of Information and the UK Supreme Court.

All of which means that Ed Miliband doesn't really know what he's talking about when it comes to Equal Pay - and the bad news is that it's not all the fault of the Tories or the Coalition Government.