I will blog further about the content of the Returning Officer’s report into the UNISON General Secretary election in due course (regular readers of this Blog – Sid and Doris Blogger – will appreciate that my modesty makes me uncomfortable with the obs…Read more…

Christina McAnea has been elected General Secretary of UNISON and deserves congratulations on her victory and best wishes for the challenges she will be leading UNISON members to face. The candidate I voted for, rank and file challenger Paul Holme…Read more…

 
This could have been the worst year just gone. It wasn’t just the global pandemic which took my father’s life. After being diagnosed with cancer in 2018 and nearly dying of sepsis in 2019 I was told in 2020 that my cancer was now advanced and th…Read more…

It being New Year’s Eve I am intending to attend the Labour Grassroots online party in order to look back at one very minor aspect of the awful year now passing, associated with one rather minor petty bureaucrat who brought a little tedium and, in some…Read more…

Your humble blogger has added my name – for what it’s worth – to the campaign for Zero covid. Labour movement activists cannot remain simple spectators as we head towards the second year of a global pandemic which has cost tens of thousands of lives an…Read more…

As an Xmas present to regular readers of this blog (Sid and Doris Blogger) here is a link to an excellent new site – Strike Map.
This is an excellent initiative to collate in one place online information, submitted by workers, on strike action being ta…Read more…

It is some years now since your blogger was the parent of school aged children, but I remember all too well the challenge of arranging leave commitments and finding childcare to cover school holidays and closures. 
Nevertheless, given the accelera…Read more…

86 nations have signed up to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. 51 states have ratified the Treaty – but the UK has done neither, which is why the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament is campaigning to get the UK Government to support the Tr…Read more…

As one of a number of parting shots to the world community, the Trump administration broke ranks with international consensus (and UN resolutions) by unilaterally recognising Morocco’s lengthy occupation of the territory of the Western Sahara.
…Read more…

 
We are awaiting the results of the election for UNISON General Secretary. The lengthy delay between the close of the ballot and the timetabled date for the announcement of the vote has presumably been set to allow time for a full investigation i…Read more…

In amongst all the other things that have happened this year, looking back, an important victory for local government – and for local government workers – was won back in April (on a day when I was somewhat preoccupied) – when the Supreme Court release…Read more…

Yesterday it was a pleasure to chair a meeting of the General Committee (GC) of Brighton Pavilion Labour Party which had been convened (by earlier decision of the GC) to work through a backlog of motions submitted by branches over recent months…Read more…

The Supreme Court decision to clear the way towards a third runway at Heathrow can’t really be legally wrong. That is rather the point of having a “supreme” court – and what the word “supreme” means in this context (as opposed to any other context).
Th…Read more…

Among the legacies of New Labour in Government were a series of partial and unfinished constitutional innovations, including (for example) limited reform of the House of Lords (to remove voting rights from most, but not all, hereditary peers, leaving a…Read more…

This is a cross-posting of a piece I have written for LabourHub in relation to the election of the General Secretary of the Labour Party. (I would recommend that readers have a look at LabourHub regularly.)
Perceptive readers (Sid and Doris Eag…Read more…

It’s that time of year I suppose, so here is a reminder of a seasonal song from ten years ago, as students began the first phase of years of struggle against the austerity politics of the then Coalition Government.
Merry Xmas to regular readers…Read more…

 
Today I was pleased to speak at the Labour Grassroots Zoom meeting, which focused on the problems being created by the correspondence from the General Secretary of the Labour Party purporting to issue “guidance” which steers Party members away f…Read more…

So Compass have launched “Compass Labour”  as part of a wider project to campaign to bring together a “progressive majority”. On the one hand this is an idea which pops up from time to time when it looks like the Tories cannot be defeated any…Read more…

 
Regular readers of this blog (Sid and Doris Blogger) will realise that you are unlikely to read here any praise of the Tory Government – but anyone would have to admire the Prime Minister’s imaginative development of the English language.
Appare…Read more…

Open Labour have published an interesting little pamphlet, which I intend to read more fully, advocating what it calls a “progressive foreign policy”.To be precise it is titled “A Progressive Foreign Policy for New Times”. Yes, that’s right “New Times”…Read more…