Glasgow and Equal Pay
The Labour leader of Glasgow City Council, Frank McAveety, has an opinion piece in The Herald today in which he sets out his party's case for a big 3% increase in the council tax for 2017.
Now the article goes in for a lot of SNP bashing which is to be expected, but not even a word of Frank's lengthy column deals with the long-running scandal of equal pay.
So while Frank has lots to say about the council's budget over the years he strangely fails to mention the fact that Glasgow's budget virtually doubled in the 10 year period between 1997 and 2007.
Despite the relative plenty during these 'boom years' Glasgow, like many other big Labour councils, presided over highly discriminatory pay arrangements and rubbed salt into the wound by intimidating thousands of low paid women workers into accepting poor offers of settlement.
Glasgow's pay arrangements are now the subject of a major appeal to the Court of Session, Scotland's highest civil court, and may end up in the UK Supreme Court.
The other puzzling thing about Frank's Herald piece is that there is no mention of the fact that neighbouring Labour-run councils in South Lanarkshire and Inverclyde are planing to freeze the basic council tax this year, despite facing all the same pressures as Glasgow.
Read full article via the link below to The Herald.
http://www.heraldscotland.com/opinion/15094969.Agenda__Cuts_by_the_SNP_are_reason_for_our_decision_to_raise_council_tax_by_3_/
Agenda: Cuts by the SNP are reason for our decision to raise council tax by 3%
Agenda: Cuts by the SNP are reason for our decision to raise council tax by 3%
LET’S start with the news; not the “fake news” so widespread these days but real news. I’ve done the sums. I’ve added up the columns and carried forward. I’ve sharpened my pencil and have done it all again, just to check.
The real news for the citizens of Glasgow is that, since the SNP came to power at Holyrood, every single ward area in our city has lost funding worth a massive £14 million.
In my book, that amounts to Scottish Government cuts heading in the direction of £1.5m a year, for every ward in Glasgow.
