Eric Joyce

In the next few weeks, you’ll hear endless grumbles from charities about the Lobbying Act. They will argue it restricts their spending on political campaigning during the run-up to general elections. Of course, charities aren’t supposed to be party-political, and until now the highly-partisan campaigns they’ve run at election time have somehow never fallen foul of charity law. The bosses of these organisations claim they’re on a higher moral plane than other political campaigners. This allows them to dodge questions about whether they have a partisan objective. The moral high ground is built, they say, on their aims, motivation and modus operandi. But are these charities really acting in the public interest?

So Grangemouth is safe, after Unite changed its mind and urged the company to implement the very 'survival plan' that it so fiercely rejected to begin with. Scotland's commentariat have almost universally seen the episode a matter of how a wealthy owner of a private company is able to throw his weight around.  The Labour Party, too, has unequivocally supported Unite, the union whose strike threat led to the plant's closure in the first place. The party has proclaimed as evil the billionaire with a yacht and the lack of accountability of private companies.  The thrust of discourse in Scotland has been that Unite may not have handled the issue very well until now, but that's in the past - what matters now is the 800 jobs at threat.