Mark Irvine - Blogger, Campaigner, Organiser

I wrote a post the other day about an ongoing pay dispute in Glasgow City Council where the unions are running a campaign under the slogan of 'Justice for Jannies'. Now I would have thought that there must be lots of other groups in Glasgow (including female dominated groups of staff) with similar complaints to the one now being raised by by the unions on behalf of School Janitors. But who knows maybe this new found militancy is slowly working its way along the M8 motorway in the general direction on North Lanarkshire. Curiouser and Curioser (17/05/16) I've just received an interesting email from a reader in North Lanarkshire who says that not all Council Janitors are on Grade NLC 6 - and that some are on Grade NLC 4 (which is still higher than the NLC Grade 3 awarded to Home Carers). Now this is very odd because under the previous Manual Worker (MW) Job Evaluation Scheme (JES) the vast majority of Janitors were on Grade MW5 just like the Hom...

Here's one of my favourite posts from the blog site archive which shines a light on the behaviour of the local Unison branch during the long fight for equal pay in Labour-run South Lanarkshire Council. Makes me laugh my head off every time I read the baloney that desperate people would come up with to try and discredit Action 4 Equality Scotland, while helping senior council managers and local politicians keep the workforce in the dark over equal pay. So the moral of the story is don't believe for a minute that local trade unions 'leaders' know what they're talking about when it comes to job evaluation and equal pay, because all too often they haven't a clue.    South Lanarkshire Update (12/08/15) I've had lots of emails from readers in South Lanarkshire about the behaviour of the trade unions and the local Unison branch, in particular, over equal pay.  Apparently the union branch had said lots of silly things on its Facebook page which do...

Rafael Behr had a thoughtful piece in The Guardian the other day in which he argued that the Labour will never find its way back into government until the party faces up to its obvious problems in terms of public perception. Some of the more glaring problems suggest that Labour is regarded as: the party of benefits the party of uncontrolled immigration the party of left-liberal tastes the party of sectional interests, irrelevant to the majority A harsh message to take on board for sure, but no business or service industry in the world can afford to turn a deaf ear to its 'customers' - and its customers are not just the relatively small band of Labour activists and supporters.   Which is something that Jeremy Corbyn and the new Labour leadership seem unwilling to concede.  http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/25/labour-answers-lie-in-losses-not-victories Labour’s answers lie in its losses, not its victories By  Rafael Behr ...

John McTernan has some fun with this column in The Telegraph in which he delivers a positive assessment of Tony Blair's legacy. But however rational McTernan's analysis may be, he knows that any praise for the former Labour leader draws the Blair-haters out in force who then begin to howl at the moon, politically speaking, instead of having anything forward looking or intelligent to say. Hate is a very powerful  emotion, but ultimately a destructive one if taken too far as the Labour Party is finding out to its cost . http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/24/labours-deluded-corbynite-twitterati-are-sealing-it-off-from-the/ Labour's deluded Corbynite Twitterati are sealing it off from the electorate By  JOHN MCTERNAN  - The Telegraph CREDIT: DOMINIC LIPINSKI/PA WIRE "Si monumentum requiris, circumspice," Tony Blair told Bronwen Maddox, editor of Prospect magazine, during a fascinating and wide-ranging interview. Not literally. What he actuall...

Ken Clarke, the veteran Tory MP, hit back at those in his own ranks who are using the EU referendum to mount a Conservative leadership election. The former chancellor told the BBC's Today programme: “I think Boris and Donald Trump should go away for a bit and enjoy themselves and not get in the way of serious issues which modern countries in the 21st century face. “He’s a much nicer version of Donald Trump but the campaign is remarkably similar in my opinion, and about as relevant to the real problems the public face.” Mr Clarke added that the comments from Ms Dorries and other Conservative backbenchers who have been publicly debating Mr Cameron's future were a "diversion" from the referendum. “It’s completely unhelpful – not least because it diverts attention from what we ought to be talking about. We ought to be talking about the benefit this country gets, and always has, from being in the EU.” Now Boris may have the same narcissistic relationship with h...