I really should have known better.After several years of advising Labour Party comrades to be careful what they share on Facebook, I fell, hook, line and sinker, for something of a scam yesterday.During the day, I noticed that the TUC were advertising,…Read more…

I was struck by a report in the Huffington Post about falling membership of GMB and UNISON. The report was clearly based on the annual returns submitted by each trade union to the Certification Officer, but had used the total membership figures rather …Read more…

 As I blogged on Wednesday, I have been thinking about the massive loss of membership experienced by the Labour Party in the period since Kier Starmer has been our Leader. Serendipitously, I have also been reading Mike Phipps’ excellent new book “…Read more…

Our Labour Party has lost 90,000 members over the past year. The party’s statements revealed that the number of Labour members fell by 17.4% from 523,332 in 2020 to 432,213 at the end of 2021.Although our current membership is well below its recent pea…Read more…

In the coming week, a relatively small group of Labour Party activists will meet in Brighton and Hove at the inaugural meeting of the new Local Government Committee (LGC) for our City. Having taken the decision not to put myself forward for the LGC bec…Read more…

In what may be a first for this Blog, I am indebted to the North Yorkshire branch of UNISON for speedily reporting the outcome of yesterday’s meeting of the National Joint Council (NJC) Committee (the indirectly elected body which oversees pay negotiat…Read more…

As regular readers of this blog (Sid and Doris Blogger) will be aware, I occasionally comment upon my state of health, since my cancer diagnosis in 2018, and the spread of my cancer in 2020.My cancer has given me more cause than most to be thankful for…Read more…

Last month’s UNISON National Delegate Conference (NDC) opened with unanimous support for motion 15, which included the following text;“At its creation, UNISON became a union with the majority of its members being women and from the start put rules in p…Read more…

 Boris Johnson has removed the whip from Tobias Ellwood because the latter missed yesterday’s vote of confidence in the House of Commons. This is a pretty transparent attempt this to remove a vote from the camp of Penny Mordaunt in order to benefi…Read more…

Yorkshire & Humberside

The Tory leadership contenders are ducking out of further televised debates because they realise that that their internecine infighting is just damaging their Party.The same can be true of squabbling within a trade union. Du…Read more…

One month on from UNISON National Delegate Conference (NDC) and UNISON is busy focusing on what matters to our members. In our largest Service Group, our largest bargaining unit has embarked upon a campaign to achieve a decent pay rise for local govern…Read more…

Critics of the left-wing majority on UNISON’s National Executive Council (NEC) were cock-a-hoop when National Delegate Conference (NDC) agreed Motion 10 criticising the NEC for some decisions it had taken and instructing them to rescind them.
That moti…Read more…

Whilst the country has been gripped by the drama of the decline and fall of Boris Johnson, my trade union UNISON has continued to witness its own little drama.
Opponents of the left-wing majority of NEC members elected last summer are energetically per…Read more…

Over the past couple of years, the Labour Party, of which I have been a member for more than four decades, has been brought into disrepute by the blatant abuse of its disciplinary processes to settle political differences.
I have generally refrained fr…Read more…

I won’t post here a comprehensive overview of UNISON National Delegate Conference, having already written a brief such overview for Labour Hub which you can read online here. This post isn’t brief.
What I want to do here is look at some of the most con…Read more…

Sun Tzu said that “every battle is either won or lost before it is fought”.
This was, I think, true of several important debates at UNISON’s National Delegate Conference held last week in Brighton.
Whilst UNISON members are facing a “cost-of-living cri…Read more…

Having been invited in to UNISON National Delegate Conference to give the vote of thanks to President Paul Holmes, I was then presented with honorary life membership (in accordance with Rule C.2.7) by the then Vice President, now our President, Andrea …Read more…

(I will, over the next few days, try to catch up with some posts about the goings on in the Brighton Centre this week. However, I won’t be posting in chronological order because this is my blog and I write what I want on it. If you think that’s wrong g…Read more…

After a positive start to UNISON National Delegate Conference yesterday morning, I’m not sorry that my health precluded my hanging around to watching person the bear garden that was Tuesday afternoon.
I have, however, had the benefit of detailed report…Read more…

30 years ago, I attended my first trade union conference as a delegate. It was NALGO’s penultimate conference, in Bournemouth. I attended the last NALGO conference the following year, and from 1994 onwards I was present at every UNISON conference as ei…Read more…