Swindon Borough Council has received the ballot result from the Electoral Reform Service and it reads as follows:

 Turnout: 66%

Those voting Yes to Stock Transfer: 28%

Those voting No to Stock Transfer: 72%

Following a vigorous campaign by both tenants groups and the Labour Party for a NO vote, tenants have voted by a clear majority to remain with the Council under the new self-financing rules.  The average turnout for housing ballots of this size is 61%, so obviously more tenants than in most housing ballots have come out to reject a stock transfer.

by Katie Bond, Swindon Advertiser

TRADE union members at Great Western Hospital are set to ballot for action over bullying and harassment of staff by their contractor.

About 150 GMB members employed by private contractor Carillion at the GWH are to ballot for strike action over bullying, harassment and discrimination by their management.

The workers are employed as porters, theatre technicians, in catering and cleaning and other support roles in the hospital.

They also claim that Carillion will not allow them to take holiday between now and the beginning of January, even though the hospital slows down over the Christmas period.

GWH was one of the first hospitals to be built under the Private Finance Initiative at a cost of £148m with Carillion as the lead contractor.

GMB regional officer Carole Vallelly said: “GMB members at the hospital had a private meeting with Paul Kenny, GMB General Secretary, when he visited them at hospital on Monday.

“He was told of the myriad problems members are experiencing at the hands of managers of Carillion.

“These problems have as their root the PFI contractor’s failure to deal properly with concerns over holiday arrangements, shift arrangements and general consultation with the staff.

“Instead they face a culture of bullying, harassment and discrimination.”

A spokesman for Carillion said the company was disappointed to hear the allegations but claims not to have received the allegations referred to by GMB.

He said: “We have a long history of excellent employee relations with our staff at the Great Western Hospital and are very disappointed to hear of the allegations outlined in the GMB’s news release.

“We take matters of this nature very seriously and have well-established processes under which our employees are encouraged to come forward with any concerns they may have, so that allegations of this kind can be investigated.

“However, as we have not received the allegations to which the GMB refers, we cannot comment further at this stage.”

But Swindon’s GMB branch secretary Andy Newman disagreed.

“Carillion refuses to negotiate with GMB so we have been unable to formally lay out the issues. But several staff members have raised these issues with their supervisors,” he said.

“Carillion will not allow staff to take holiday between December 10 and January 7, even though the hospital does slow down over the holiday period. This doesn’t make business sense, and inconveniences staff who wish to share the holidays with their family.

“Many of the staff are devout Christians and we believe that this amounts to religious discrimination, and we are consulting our solicitors. All the staff are asking for is to be treated with respect.”

Oonagh Fitzgerald, the director of workforce and education at the GWH NHS Foundation Trust ,said allegations made by a member of a staff of a contractor, or other third party, are the responsibility of the company concerned.

“We are confident that if the union provides information to support the allegations then they will be investigated openly and fairly by Carillion,” she said.

(PICTURE: STRIKING GAS WORKERS FROM 1979)

A public sector walk out will be the biggest strike the town has ever seen, according to union bosses.

On Wednesday, November 30, thousands of public sector workers are expected to walk out over the Government’s proposed changes to their pensions.

Seventeen trade unions will strike, resulting in more than 7,000 people in Swindon taking action.

It is likely that all schools will be closed and most council services will be affected, as will the research councils and non-emergency NHS services.

There will be a march through the town centre, starting at Wharf Green at 10am and heading to MECA for a rally at 11am.

Jeannette Martin, regional director of the Royal College of Nursing, will be speaking at the rally.

Although the RCN will not be striking, Jeanette said the union felt strongly about the proposed changes and would ballot for industrial action unless the Government compromised over proposed changes to nurses’ pensions.

The RCN has 400,000 members nationally and is known for being completely opposed to industrial action, having never taken part in any in its history.

But the union feels so strongly about changes to NHS pension scheme that it is supporting other unions on strike next Wednesday and members who are not working on the day will attend the rally.

Jeannette said: “We want to show support in our own time for other unions. We remain very concerned for what is happening.

“The proposals will mean nurses having to work until the age of 68.

“It also means nurses will be paying more and getting less.

“It is not as if there is a need for it – nurse pension plans work differently and there is a £2bn surplus that the treasury can use, so I see increasing contributions as a way of increasing that surplus to manage the national deficit.”

Swindon GMB branch secretary Andy Newman said: “Trade unions are being forced to protest on November 30 because the Government is failing to negotiate about ill-considered pension reforms.

“We also welcome the support of a number of unions who are not yet taking strike action, like the RCN, the Fire Brigades Union and the Police Federation.”

Wiltshire Industrial History: working class episodes was launched at the Swindon Steam Museum on Saturday 12th November 2011.

Rosie MacGregor, the Chair of White Horse (Wiltshire) Trades Council, was interviewed by BBC Wiltshire Sound.

Picture of Rosie MacGregor by Bob Naylor©

Rosie’s BBC radio interview:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/47142092/rosie%20BBC%20Wiltshire%20Sound.mp3

BUY THE BOOK HERE: http://whitehorsetuc.org/

Based upon a series of talks given at a local history day-school in Bradford on Avon in 2010, White Horse Trades Council is publishing a new book that lifts the lid on Wiltshire’s hidden radical past.

Trade union militancy, machine breaking and unlawful assembly, as well as the fascinating story of how Trowbridge was the only town in Britain to have a husband and wife team of Communist councillors. This book uniquely brings together the voices of academics and local trade unionists to tell the stories of ordinary working people engaged in extraordinary events.

Professor Adrian Russell, Birmingham University on Thomas Helliker the Trowbridge Martyr; Nigel Costley, Regional Secretary South West TUC on Swing Rebellion in Wiltshire; Steve Poole, Principal History Lecturer University of the West of England on Chartism in Rural Wiltshire; Cllr Derique Montaut, former leader of Swindon Labour councillors on Strikes and Socialism in Swindon in the 1960s and 1970s; Dave Chapple and Rosie McGregor on Phyllis and Idris Rose, Trowbridge’s Communist Councillors. Featuring original illustrations by Peter Field.

Please send a cheque for £8.50 per copy (inclusive of postage) to Rosie McGregor, White Horse (Wilts) TUC. 24 Bearfield Buildings, Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire BA15 1RP

or buy online

GMB will attend talks tomorrow with council leaders on the dispute about the future of Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS) which covers two million workers in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. These are the first talks since unions announced plans to ballot members for strike action if Government press ahead with changes to public sector pension schemes. If the ballots are positive the first day of strike action has been fixed for Wednesday 30th November.

Those covered by the scheme include staff working directly for councils and for contractors of outsourced services, school staff, many further and higher education staff, social services, environment agency, housing associations and regional government staff. Further details of the LGPS and other schemes covered by strike action are set out in notes to editors below.

The Government want to increase pension contributions by 50%, raise the retirement age and lower the value of the pensions paid.

Brian Strutton GMB National Secretary for Public Services said “Tthese are the first talks with the local government employers since GMB announced a ballot process that signals the start of a long, hard and dirty dispute brought about by government’s intransigent approach to negotiations. The talks will be followed by separate talks with Government on Thursday.

The ballot for industrial action will include care workers, social workers, hospital porters, refuse workers, healthcare assistants, PCSOs, teaching assistants, paramedics, 999 control room staff, gravediggers and thousands of other frontline public sector workers. These are not workers that want to strike but they are angry and frustrated by the continued vilification of their jobs and the contempt shown by Ministers for their commitment and their futures.

Already more than one in four Local Government workers are priced out of the LGPS yet government and council leaders are seeking to reduce benefits and increase member contributions to ensure quality pension saving becomes the exclusive preserve of the few. There is still time for a negotiated solution but we cannot delay the ballot process any longer.

Between them the LGPS and NHS schemes already take in £6billion a year more from contributions and investment income than is paid out in pensions. In the case of the LGPS there is income from the £165billion of assets. Report after report has shown that the costs of public sector pensions are falling and the reforms introduced less than five years ago are saving employers billions. Reforms to the LGPS are already saving councils more than £2 billion yet Eric Pickles wants to raise a further £900m from the two million members paying into the fund despite knowing that doing this will jeopardize the future of the scheme. It is a sign of the government’s failure that Pickles will negotiate with council leaders about imposing cuts to the pension scheme but refuses to talk to workers whose retirement is under threat.”

Good day out yesterday with GMB colleagues at Swindon Pride

Sir Roy Strong, a historian and former director of the National Portrait Gallery and Victoria and Albert Museum in London – has apparently written a short book on the subject of English national identity, called Visions of England. He recently took Justin Webb, the editor of the BBC’s Today programme to Goudhurst in the Kentish Weald, to show a village and landscape hardly changed in decades.

Looking at the slideshow from the BBC it is indeed remarkable how the physical presence of the village and the rolling fields appear unchanged by time, and the accompanying music, the Lark Ascending by Vaughan Williams is lyrical and evocative of a gentle English country landscape which really does exist. I do get to drive around Wiltshire as part of my branch secretary duties with GMB, and I am frequently overcome by the beauty. Wiltshire has perhaps a unique political geography, dominated as it is by the Army, and peppered with small, unglamourous working class towns like Melksham and Trowbridge. But Somerset, Dorset and Devon, alongside Wiltshire, the parts of England I am most familiar with, are all working rural landscapes, with their own distinctive sensibility.

Sir Roy’s argument is that the comfortable and modest scale of the English village has a defining impact on the national character, much more than the clamour of the city, and the collective discipline of the factory and the call centre. This is an argument that keeps resurfacing, from George Orwell to John Major, and therefore cannot simply be dismissed as reactionary. However, neither should it be accepted.

Firstly, we should observe that the apparent preservation of rural life in villages like Goudhurst is in fact the result of the substantial destruction of the rural political economy, where quaint villages become colonised by the urban rich, either for retirement or as second homes, who drive house prices out of the reach of families who have lived there for generations. Furthermore, the objections of the well-to-do incomers to the development of social housing and new business premises kills the local economy, and declining local spending and falling numbers of children jeopardise local shops and schools.

Secondly, the rural economy never been sustained by agriculture alone, as England had a traditional wool and then cotton industry, first based upon handicraft production, and then concentrated in mills and manufacturies; and this industry was distributed to avail itself of water power. Ludditism, republicanism and Chartism were born in the small rural towns surrounding the wool trade.

In agriculture itself, there was a form of radical conservatism among the rural poor, captured brilliantly by William Cobbett in his Rural Rides, published in 1830. The traditional moral economy of the countryside involved a social contract between the squirearchy and the labouring poor, living in face to face communities where everyone knew one another. Enclosure and machinery, and the rising power of the money based political economy, broke these moral obligations, and ground over the rural poor like a Juggernaut, and they responded in a strange mixture of hoping that the Church and Crown might restore the old ways, along with violent machine wrecking, arson, and physical intimidation. Nor should we forget that it was rural Dorset labourers who inspired the first national trade union campaign, with tens of thousands in London, Manchester and Bristol campaigning for the return the Tolpuddle matyrs from exile.

The English consciousness of who we are, and the collective feeling of shared history, never wanders far from a sense of them and us.

Another fallacy of Sir Roy’s position is to assume that the countryside of England (which somehow always seems to mean the rural landscape of Southern England) and village life is a more important aspect of Englishness than the cities. But surely, the iconic cultural icons of England in the Twentieth Century have been born in the smoke and energy of the city. It is the multi-cultural experience of modern urban life that provides the shared community of experience for most people in England, whether they choose to identify themselves as English or not.

(Pictured is the Wiltshire village of Aldbourne, familiar to Dr Who fans as the film location for the 1971 story “the Daemons“, it was also the real life billet of the American soldiers of Easy Company in 1944, whose tale was dramatised in the HBO series “Band of Brothers”)

This year’s Tolpuddle Festival (15th to 17th July 2011) has a fantastic line up of entertainment.

The festival is organised by South West TUC to commemorate the Tolpuddle Martyrs, a group of brave men who defied the law to form a trade union in 1834, at a time when working women and men had few legal rights.

The festival is FREE on Sunday 17th July, and we are organising a FREE coach from Swindon and Salisbury. This will leave from Swindon Bus station at 9:00 am, and from Salisbury bus station at 10:00 am. Please ring the office on 01793 818005 to book a place

A SWINDON man has been revealed as a hero of the Spanish Civil War.

In this, the 75th anniversary of the conflict in which thousands died, the family of Captain George Fletcher are seeking more information to piece together his past.

Research carried out by Cpt Fletcher’s son, John, 63, also uncovered the fact he has two brothers in the town that he had not known about.

It is thought that brothers Robert and Reginald, aged in their 70s, still live in Swindon where Cpt Fletcher married their mother, whose maiden name was Ferris.

John, who works in Exeter, said his father married his mother in 1939 after serving in the International Brigade, in Spain, as second in command of the British XV Battalion.

“I was startled to learn that my father had been married before and that he had three sons, one of whom, died aged six months,” said John.

“This came to light in research on my father which my sister and I have been undertaking.

“Naturally, I would love to get in touch with my long lost, and hitherto unknown brothers who I understand, still live in Swindon.

“I want to know so much and what happened when his first marriage fell apart.

“The research has turned up a lot of information.

I discovered my father – who never talked about his life – was a hero in Spain fighting the Fascists from 1936 to 1939.

“He was among thousands from around the world who volunteered to fight for the Republicans against the Fascist dictator General Francisco Franco.

“My father was wounded six times, including during his time commanding the British, and was in the thick of most of the battles like Belchite and the Valley of the Ebro.

“It was here he refused to leave the battlefield, despite serious wounds.

“Dad is mentioned in numerous books and I am aware that Swindon probably doesn’t know he is one of their ‘sons.’ “I would love to find out more, because on leaving Swindon he moved to Manchester where he married my late mother.”

From Manchester he joined 60 others, later to be affectionately known as the Band of Brothers.

“I have contacted the Swindon History Society for information, but unfortunately they could not help,” said John.

Anyone with information about Cpt Fletcher or his sons Robert and Reginald, can get in touch with John on 01395 267069, 07730 910454 or by emailing jfletcher.ebro@ btinternet.co.uk.