NEWS

January’s Trades Council meeting was held shortly after the Trades Union Congress announced a day of national protest on Wednesday 1st February to “Protect the Right to Strike!”:  TUC to hold national ‘protect the right to strike’ day on February 1 | TUC The Government is presenting a “Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill” to Parliament…

2022 ended with several reputable organisations producing Reports emphasising the scale of the “cost of living” pressures facing British workers, which are the root of the current “strike wave”. The International Labour Organisation claimed, in its “Global Wage Report 2022–23”, that “for the first time this century, global real wage growth has become negative while…

“Belonging: The Truth Behind the Headlines” – in Blackburn Library Tickets, Wed 14 Sep 2022 at 18:30 | Eventbrite A free community screening. Doors open 6.30pm. Film at 7.00pm. “The Parliament which granted the franchise to a large proportion of the British working class in 1867 did so with a singular lack of enthusiasm.  In…

Whilst differences in local prosperity have been manifest at many points in British history, the current shape of the British economy owes much – as do so many things – to the impact of the Conservative governments of the 1980s.  As David Smith put it, in his 1989 book “North and South”: “The consensus economics…

Alongside our local UNISON Local Government and Health Branches the Trades Council is promoting an admission-free performance in Darwen this June (Friday 24th) by the “Banner Theatre Company”. Banner Theatre is a socialist theatre company based in Birmingham. Formed in 1973, from a disparate collection of folk singers, drama teachers, office workers, broadcasters, technicians and…

It suits the Government to present the current inflationary pressure on our living standards as something very abstract and global, that nobody is responsible for.  It is a helpful explanation if you want to say that there is only so much that can be done and that everybody is, to a greater or lesser degree,…

In the lead up to the 2022 Local Council elections, senior figures in the Conservative Party made much of the claim that Conservative Councils set lower levels of Council Tax. Oliver Dowden, for instance, said that “Conservative councils charge the lowest taxes in the country”. And Victoria Atkins said that “If you look across the…

Most Trade Unionists would agree that one of the big issues facing us in Britain today is the decline in Trade Union membership since the 1970s. One of the reasons we have partnered with the Ella Barker School of Organising to run an online session on Tuesday 3rd May: Strategy, Power and Union Resurgence (actionnetwork.org)…

On 17th March the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) announced that it intended to make large-scale office closures all over the country.  Amongst the offices affected is Cardwell Place in Blackburn. April’s Trades Council meeting agreed to support the PCS campaign against these closures and to write to Blackburn’s MP, Kate Hollern, on the…

Any organisation, like our Trades Council, which must depend entirely on volunteers, fears one threat above all others – that there will be no-one available to take on the roles necessary for it to function effectively. At this year’s Annual General Meeting, which took place last week, we found ourselves within a whisker of this…