Council pays £500k for ‘People Make Glasgow’; Council’s people rewarded with pay cuts
Posted: July 3, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: industrial relations, pay, unions Leave a comment »
[There's a old joke about how there's only ever exactly enough things that happen each day to fit perfectly into a newspaper. The truth is, all too often we get to the end of a news day with more stories than can actually be crammed in, and The Morning Star is no different. So while we're getting our new website off the ground I'll just post the more urgent, interesting or amusing detritus here.]
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04/07/13 — “PEOPLE make Glasgow” according to a £500,000 council rebrand, but its own staff are mulling strike action after they were rewarded with real-terms pay cuts.
The Unison union’s Glasgow branch is one of dozens across Scotland to begin balloting on strike action yesterday over a proposed one per cent pay rise from the local authorities’ umbrella group Cosla.
A yes vote would see at least two national walkouts and rolling one-day strikes across the country before the year’s end.
Union officials say the one per cent increase would be wiped out by a projected three per cent rise in inflation — meaning local government workers’ pay packets would still be worth less than the previous year.
Inflation has already soared by more than 10 per cent since their pay was frozen in 2010.
Local authorities say they simply cannot afford more in a time of austerity.
But the ballot comes just days after Glasgow City Council confirmed the half-million budget for its new marketing slogan — ironically, “People Make Glasgow”.
From the BBC: how not to eat healthily for £1 a day
Posted: May 1, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »
The BBC have published an article by one Brian Milligan, which purports to show that it is possible to eat a healthy, varied diet for less than £1 a day. The article is – and I'm being polite here – a complete farrago of nonsense from beginning to end. Let's start with the idea that the diet Mr Milligan lived on for five days (a whole five days, imagine!) was 'healthy'.
Ed Balls
Posted: April 20, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Balls, Ed, Ed Balls 1 Comment »Ed Balls. Ed Balls
Ed Balls
Ed Balls. Read the rest of this entry »
A personal announcement on same-sex marriage
Posted: April 17, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: lgbtq, new zealand, nz, politics, satire 1 Comment »
Dear friends and readers,
Thankyou for your support and sympathy in this difficult time for Katie and I.
As you may already know, New Zealand’s parliament passed historic legislation this evening to legalise same-sex marriage; an act that cultural commentators have warned will irreparably destroy the institution of heterosexual marriage.
Katie and I have been in a loving, fulfilling relationship for seven years now – four of them as a married couple – but as of 11pm NZST we each experienced a sudden loss of interest, attraction and even basic human empathy with regard to one another.
We are therefore separating as of today, with a view to finding new partners of our own respective genders in order to comply with the spirit and letter of the law.
Since such marriages are reportedly intrinsically unsatisfying and inauthentic, my only consolation is that they are also poor environments for raising children due to their ‘party’ lifestyle and copious consumption of hard drugs.
Thankyou again for your kind words and support.
[In case it's not abundantly clear, I'm kidding. Why not go read a serious critique though, courtesy of the Queer Avengers' Beyond Marriage blog.]
SQUASH speaks out: how anti-squatting laws saw Daniel Gauntlett freeze to death
Posted: March 5, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: government, housing, politics, social issues, welfare 1 Comment »
Above: Hove & Portslade MP Mike Weatherley, who told MPs the overlap between homelessness and squatting was a “myth”.
Following on from yesterday’s interview with the creator of Is Mike Weatherley Dead Yet?, I’ve continued to try and get a response out of Tory MP Mike Weatherley, who authored the piece of legislation that made it a crime for Daniel and others to enter an otherwise unoccupied house. Read the rest of this entry »
Is Mike Weatherley Dead Yet: a brief interview
Posted: March 4, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: government, homelessness, housing, politics, protest 1 Comment »
Image by Aran Chandaran used under a Creative Commons license.
Some stories enrage you because there shouldn’t have to be anything more to say; no National Debate or serious frowny faces on Question Time. The HIV-positive asylum seeker and her 10-month-old child who starved to death in a Westminster flat last March. The teenager who set himself on fire in a council office in December after they refused to find him a home.
And now there’s 35-year-old homeless man Daniel Gauntlett, who died of hypothermia in Aylesford last week on the porch of an empty bungalow that he could not enter without facing arrest and a criminal record.
You can read the Kent Messenger’s original story by Chris Hunter here — but spreading equally quickly through Twitter, Facebook and the like is the savage fury of Is Mike Weatherley Dead Yet?, an anonymous website launched within days of the report that directly links Gauntlett’s death to the legislation authored by Tory MP Mike Weatherley and passed into law last year that criminalised any act of squatting in a residential property, derelict or not. Read the rest of this entry »
The Royal Bank of Scot-free: Retracing the Libor scam
Posted: February 9, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: banking, economics, finance, libor, RBS 1 Comment »
image via Ian Fraser.
[First published in The Morning Star, 09/02/13]
RBS chief Stephen Hester wore an especially frowny face this week to admit his bank’s role in the biggest scandal since the financial crisis itself.
Years of wholesale manipulation of the Libor rate had put a gloss on an otherwise collapsing economy, lured investors into risky financial products under false pretences and had gone on to fudge the figures of trillions of pounds’ worth of consumer loans and contracts worldwide, with the resulting sleight of hand driving businesses into bankruptcy and families from their homes.
But worst of all, it made them look bad.
“There is no room in RBS or in our industry for that kind of wrongdoing,” he told reporters, adding without a trace of irony that “we won’t be the only bank with these findings of course.”
Indeed they won’t: Barclays and UBS have already been stung for their own part in the affair, while more than a dozen other banks across Europe, Japan and the US are also under investigation.
So what exactly did they do? Read the rest of this entry »
