PEOPLE BEFORE PROFIT

Another busy week for yours truly, but found the time to see Glasgow's No.1 football team emerge victorious against Dunfermline in the Scottish Cup, which believe it or not was for the first time ever. The main focus this week, and the constant thought going through my head, is another key difference between the SNP and our Unionist opponents.

Tonight, I watched my unionist opponent, bizarrely attack the shipbuilding Trade unions for their concerns over the future of the shipyards on the Clyde. I would now doubt whether the GMB fund Mr.Davidson's campaign after that faux pas! To describe their concerns as scaremongering is either ignorance or downright stupidity.

Ever the loyalist, Ian probably thinks that the flak should move from the Westminster Government to someone else over this latest crisis. A similar tactic that is used by the Republicans in America. Make you scared of it, and find someone to blame.

Let there be no doubt, the Trade unions are correct to be worried. The decisions by the New Labour led Westminster Government over contracts continues to put penny pinching before the common good. The recommendation to class six "auxiliary" vessels, which will be used by the Royal Navy, as commercial rather than military, bear this out, as does the decision to delay aircraft carrier work.

With a tight budget being given to the MOD, can New Labour be trusted? Just ask workers at Ferguson's in Port Glasgow, where a similar stunt was pulled. Trade Union leaders like Jamie Webster, who care passionately for the future of shipbuilding on the Clyde, have every right to be concerned.

My other focus this week, as well as over the last few months, was the awful decision by Nicol Stephen, then Transport Minister, to market test the NADICS service, a traffic control service provided by Glasgow City Council, for the whole of Scotland. An ideal service being provided by what politicians now call partnership working.

The rationale behind this being suspect, was made worse by Transport Scotland botching the contract, having questionably made the contract specification difficult for Glasgow to compete for, was then made even worse by the failure to put proper protections in place for existing staff who now face being transferred to private sector providers with a large cut in pension provision, or what I like to call deferred pay. The lack of detail in the contract covering Protocols agreed by the then Scottish Executive and the STUC, and more incredibly the Cabinet Office Guidance on Staff Transfers in the Public sector, prove that our unionist opponents have little regard for workers. Transport Scotland, an unaccountable quango ripe for culling, have only a few days to sort this out, or else the legal channels beckon. There can be no excuse for ignoring Government documents which clearly describe that these types of contracts should have staff protection clauses in place.

So another choice for the voter, penny pinching versus the common good, or putting People before Profit.

I know what I would choose every time.