North Lanarkshire Update

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The hypocrisy of the Labour Party is being laid bare this morning in a series of highly topical, election-based reports from Lanarkshire by BBC Radio Scotland.

The BBC broadcast was based at Ravenscraig and various commentators looked back on the closure of the giant steelworks on this site with the loss of 800 jobs, but only after a long and high profile public campaign involving North Lanarkshire MPs and the trade unions including the Scottish TUC.

Fast forward 15 years or so to the fight for equal pay in North Lanarkshire and things look very different.

For a start, the fight for equal pay is being led by Action 4 Equality Scotland, not the trade unions and the Scottish TUC is nowhere to be seen - neither are North Lanarkshire's four Labour MPs who have hardly lifted a finger (never mind their voices) in support of the campaign and their low paid constituents.

Now Action 4 Equality Scotland represents over 3,000 clients in North Lanarkshire  and so the number of local people involved in the fight for equal pay dwarfs the size of the 800 strong workforce at Ravenscraig.     

Yet there has been no national campaign in support of equal pay by the Scottish Labour Party or the trade unions, perhaps because the employer involved is Labour-run North Lanarkshire Council, just as it was next door in neighbouring South Lanarkshire Council.

So if you ask me it's not surprising that so many voters have fallen out of love with the Labour Party, because on crucial issues Scottish Labour has become part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

Who would have thought, for example, that forty-five years after the 1970 Equal Pay Act (passed by a Labour Government) that so many low paid council employees would still be battling Labour-run councils like North Lanarkshire for their basic rights at work? 

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