I don't want to join the Labour Party

In April 2007 I joined Fujitsu-Siemens Computers, a company owned 50-50 by Fujitsu and Siemens (surprise, surprise). Last year, Siemens sold its 50% stake to Fujitsu and since then the company I joined has been merging with Fujitsu UK. (For reasons that don't matter here, it's been a fairly complex process.)

On July 22nd, I received an email from the trade union Unite, which it appears was sent to every employee of the old Fujitsu Siemens Computer company. It invited me to join Unite and attached a two page brochure explaining the benefits.

Now of course, you may be for or against trade unions in general or Unite in particular. I'm not trying to persuade you either way in this blog.

However, I was interested to read in the Independent recently that Unite gave £15m to the Labour Party last year. That's about £7 for every member of Unite. It's donated regardless of the political preference of the members.

To me this seems that joining Unite is equivalent to becoming a disenfranchised member of the Labour Party. I pay the money, but I don't get to vote on Labour Party policy (or anything else). Why would I want to do that, even if I were a Labour supporter? For that matter, who says that Labour is the best party for employed people? When Labour came to power in 1997, unemployment was rapidly shrinking. After 12 years of Labour rule, unemployment is rapidly rising and is higher than at any time since 1995.

I've asked Unite to justify their stance. I'll let you know what I hear.

Compassion for the criminals

I know this may seem an odd question, but why are we engrossed in showing compassion to out-and-out criminals?

According to the BBC website, the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, didn't want Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi to die in prison. Why not? AAaM was almost 49 when in 2001 he was sentenced to life imprisonment for the worst terrorist atrocity in British history. There had to be every expectation that he would die in prison. Why would this invoke a moment's thought, even less compassion, on the part of David Miliband?

And then there's the case of Ronnie Biggs. Sentenced to 30 years' imprisonment for his part in the Great Train Robbery, he's spent a total of about 9 years inside before being released on compassionate grounds.

If we're going to show compassion - and there are many cases where we should - let's show it to people who can reasonably claim to be deserving of it. If we were to draw up a list of such cases, I suspect Biggs and al-Megrahi would be at the bottom of it.