In many ways the Glasgow equal-pay dispute feels like the impotent final fury of the dinosaurs after the dust of a prehistoric asteroid impact blacked out the sun and condemned them all to death.
What we’re seeing now is a futile rage against irrelevance by the shady cabal of Labour politicians and trade union officials who used to treat the city as their personal fiefdom, as they sink into inglorious extinction.
We highly recommend clicking that link to real the whole series of tweets from Labour member and solicitor Ian Smart, who readers won’t need reminding is no sort of friend of the SNP or the Yes movement. Because the story goes much deeper than the common-or-garden hypocrisy we saw yesterday.
The GMB trade union orchestrating the current strike is mired up to its neck in shame over its part in the pay scandal, and still facing threats of legal action from its own female members over how it betrayed them during the dispute (and similar ones all over the UK).
As a distraction, it’s been manoeuvering frantically to turn the 48-hour stoppage into an illegal wider action aimed at crippling Glasgow, in the transparent hope that the SNP will be left with no choice but to deploy draconian Tory anti-trade-union laws against it that the GMB can use to its own and Labour’s advantage.
(Laws which, alert readers also won’t need reminding, Labour entirely failed to repeal during the 13 years of its last term in power.)
The GMB, of course, has form in political activity beyond its remit:
It’s one of the chief cheerleaders of keeping Trident in Scotland, for example:
And nor is its position as a Labour Party puppet organisation in any doubt:
But it’s not until you start reaching way back into the past of the dispute that you can fully understand just how cynical and opportunistic Scottish Labour is trying to be in the desperate flailing hope of seizing some of its heartland back from the SNP.
The party’s key demand, of course, is that the Scottish Government picks up the bill for Labour’s treachery, robbing £1 billion from other commitments to settle the tab.
But that bill originally landed squarely on the shoulders of the Labour administration at Holyrood 13 years ago, and they ran a mile from the responsibility of paying it:
And their point-blank refusal was despite the then Scottish Executive having £1.5 billion of its generous budget (funded by a friendly Labour UK government at Westminster) sitting around unspent, to the point where First Minister Jack McConnell sent it back to the Treasury because he couldn’t think of anything to do with it.
(While it was also wasting eye-watering sums of money on murderously expensive PFI projects that could have been paid for at a fraction of the cost by using just a small slice of the cash. Because if there’s one thing we can see that Labour loves doing in power, it’s initiating grand projects and kicking the cost down the road for someone else to pay later.)
With the 2007/8 financial crash still a couple of years away, all of the Labour-controlled councils facing the problem had also accumulated sizeable contingency warchests amounting to hundreds of millions of pounds, which they stubbornly declined to put to the service of fulfilling their equal-pay obligations:
Meanwhile the party’s tame media voices focused their attention on smearing the lawyers acting for the women whose employers and unions had let them down:
Which brings us we are today. Having entirely created the problem, Labour refused to fix it when it blew up in their face, stalled for a decade and wasted millions of pounds fighting underpaid women through the courts until some of them literally died of old age, and is now demanding the SNP immediately do the thing Labour wouldn’t do when it had the chance.
To Scottish Labour’s Praetorian guard of old white men, the well-fed Tammany Hall regime of politicians and union officials who for generations used Glasgow as a cash cow for their own personal enrichment and status, this dispute is their dying curse – a spiteful knife-lunge at the party who usurped them, the voters who rejected them and their own members who turned on them.
It has precisely nothing to do with securing the rightful pay of mistreated women. If it did, Labour governments and Labour councils and Labour trade unions could have fixed it once and for all a dozen years ago when the money was available, instead of stitching the women up in dodgy discriminatory deals, leaving the mess for someone else to clear up down the road, and wasting a fortune in the process, before eventually resorting to blaming each other in desperation.
The ever-faithful Scottish media is doing its best to help cover up the truth. But this is the internet age, where memory can’t be so easily erased, and their game IS over. Scotland sees through them.
