Deserved Downfall
Nick Cohen made my day recently with this piece in The Observer in which he took Labour's deputy leader, Tom Watson, to task for appointing himself as the House of Commons 'Noncefinder General'.
But what also made me laugh my head off was not just Nick's demolition of Watson, but his nailing of the Scottish journalist, Ruth Wishart, who has written some dreadfully, ill-informed articles on equal pay.
So much so that I asked The Herald newspaper for the 'right to reply' to a very bitter column from Ruth in which she sang the praises of the trade unions over equal pay (relatively speaking at least) while criticising 'No Win No Fee' operations like Action 4 Equality Scotland.
"The unions, however dozy, went into bat for nothing" said Ruth.
But of course this was not true because the unions charge their members millions and scullions of pounds a year in membership fees which I pointed out in my subsequent 'right of reply' article which was also published by The Herald.
In South Lanarkshire the trade unions actively discouraged their members from pursuing claims against the Labour-run council (I wonder why?), so they didn't go into bat at all, as Ruth suggested, while raking in millions of pounds in membership fees during the long fight for equal pay.
In North Lanarkshire, as regular readers know, the GMB union has made a mess of their members' equal pay claims, so they may have gone into bat but performed really poorly - 'out for a duck' to use a cricketing term.
Nick Cohen also nailed Ruth over her involvement in Lord McCluskey's inquiry into the Scottish press whose recommendations were so authoritarian that even Alex Salmond (Scotland's First Minister at the time) dismissed them out of hand.
So, Ruth has 'form' as they say and I was disappointed in her churlish refusal to meet with me to set the record on equal pay straight.
I must re-publish some of these post from the blog site because they really are such great fun, but in the meantime here's what Nick Cohen had to say.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/11/deserved-downfall-tom-watson-leon-brittan
Why a deserved downfall beckons for Tom Watson
By Nick Cohen
The Labour deputy leader’s ill-informed hounding of Leon Brittan was distasteful in the extreme
Tom Watson: 'When he hounded a dying man to his grave, he sank lower than the News of the World reporters he and Hacked Off once fought.' Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian
