UNISON president Lucia McKeever opened the union’s conference this morning in Glasgow, praising the tremendous resolve of the union and decrying the Tories’ “shameless attempt to drive us back to Victorian times.”
Remarking that chancellor George Osbourne has declared the country has had enough of banker bashing, she joked that “if banker bashing has become a crime I think a lot of us will be in prison tonight!”
For a modern industrial nation, she noted, the UK already had the toughest anti-trade union legislation in the world. “But now the government wants to go for the jugular.”
However, she said, UNISON was ready to meet their challenges. “We’re changing the union to keep up with changing times.”
