Hardline union chiefs run risk of humiliating Scotland on global stage

In a couple of weeks’ time, the whole planet will have its eyes on Glasgow as world leaders converge to discuss how to avoid global climate catastrophe. It should be a time for Scotland’s largest city to show off its wares and prove that it really is ‘the friendly city’.

Perhaps even to remind others that ‘Glasgow’s miles better’, in the words of one of the more memorable promotional slogans of the past.

Instead, playing host to Cop26 looks set to be a national – even an international – embarrassment for Glasgow and for the Scottish Government.

When President Joe Biden and his predecessor, Barack Obama, accompanied by the heads of government and state from more than 100 countries, arrive in the dear green place, they will see a city on its knees: filthy, gridlocked and divided.

no one should be all that surprised that the trade unions are exploiting Cop26 for their own ends: that’s why their members pay their membership dues, to improve their own wages and working conditions.

If those unions then choose to hold the city to ransom during the most important event in its history, then their members can hardly complain. But the rest of us might.

Targeting Cop26 reflects the same mentality that baggage handlers at airports have when they announce their annual summer strikes just as the country wants to jet off somewhere warmer and sunnier.

Knowing that their political masters have set great store by putting on a good show for visiting dignitaries next month, unions couldn’t resist taking advantage.

First we had the refuse collectors. In recent months Glasgow has started to look and smell distinctly shabby, as council leaders imposed their new collection regime: bulky items are no longer collected free of charge, which has led to a huge increase in fly-tipping.

General domestic waste bins also shifted to a three-week collection cycle, leading to overflowing garbage in local streets. Glasgow is now thought to be home to the UK’s fourth-largest rat population, with a number of binmen hospitalised after being attacked by the diseasefilled rodents.

TO make things worse, the GMB union, which represents refuse collectors in the city, has announced its members will go on strike for the length of Cop26 in a dispute over pay.

So however bad things are today, they will get a lot worse even as delegates and prime ministers arrive at the Scottish Event Campus to discuss the future of the planet.

A bin collection strike in a city already gaining a reputation as the fly-tipping capital of Scotland would be bad enough. But now we have confirmation that railway workers will also be called onto the picket lines during the climate conference.

The railway union, the RMT, insists that the pay offer made by ScotRail management isn’t enough to avoid the strike, which will mean the network could grind to a halt. So anyone trying to get to Cop26 will have to get on a bus or a bike.

The conference may look like an ideal opportunity for the unions to get their way; after all, Scotland’s political leaders will want to give the impression to the rest of the world that Scotland is not a dysfunctional entity that can’t even empty the bins or get the trains to run at all, never mind on time.

In reality, the unions couldn’t have picked a worse time in the past 50 years to demand extra cash for their members.

Rail passenger revenue in Scotland is barely half what it was before the pandemic struck – managers are struggling to keep the service running at all, and couldn’t without massive extra government funding.

A big pay rise at some point in the future may well be justified, but as we struggle to resurrect the economy from the huge hit it has suffered in the past 18 months, this is not the time.

This Scottish Government, of course, never tires of making a rod for its own back.

ScotRail is currently owned and run by a private company, Abellio, whose job it is to negotiate pay deals with the unions.

next year all that will change. Ministers at Holyrood will usher in a new era of socialism, with a publicly owned ScotRail and ministers once more in direct charge of what station guards and drivers are paid.

PERHAPS the unions will see such a change as an opportunity to demand even higher wages. And why shouldn’t they? When nicola Sturgeon and her Cabinet colleagues are seen as the direct employers of our train crews, they will find it almost impossible to resist demands for regular pay hikes, especially if the price of disobedience is the country grinding to a halt.

Similarly, local councils have just spent billions of pounds of UK Treasury money to keep hundreds of thousands of workers at home doing nothing during the pandemic. The reason the SnP-run Glasgow City Council cut back on bin collections was mainly down to cost savings. What makes the GMB think now is the time to demand more pay for its members?

Maybe if Miss Sturgeon hadn’t singled out nurses as a special case who deserved a higher annual salary increase than their English colleagues, then other essential workers wouldn’t feel so neglected or exploited.

Of course our nHS workers deserve a pay rise – look at their tremendous efforts to keep the rest of us safe and healthy. But playing one group of employees off against another is bad politics: there is more than one type of essential worker.

As the 1970s drew to a close, strikes brought the country to its knees, with power cuts, food shortages and the dead lying unburied. Given the opportunity Glasgow was given to showcase its many positive attributes, it is shameful – and downright embarrassing – that our trade union and political leaders are about to humiliate us in front of the entire world.