Tuesday 2 November 2010

Coleman versus the FBU: which side are Barnet Tories on?

It's not explicit, but the coverage by the news blog London Daily News is broadly sympathetic to the FBU as it reports yesterday's picket line incidents of violence: violence against striking firefighters, that is, with two men being knocked over and another one run into by vehicles driven by people breaking the strike. A police officer was also knocked over.

London Daily News is associated with Barnet Tory councillor Andreas Tambourides. Is a section of Barnet's Tories distancing itself from Brian Coleman and his pivotal role in the battle against London's firefighters?

Can these people exert pressure in the Tory Party to get them to get Coleman to withdraw the absurd threat to sack all of London's firefighters? If they can, they should. This industrial battle is starting to look bad for them.

Update: actually, the reason this press coverage is so fair towards the FBU is because it reprints an FBU press release! "Barnet Tory blog parrots FBU" is not such an interesting headline, but it seems to be true. Why is that, then?

1 comment:

Mrs Angry said...

Coleman turned up late for the full council meeting tonight and looked, well,rather different to his normal bumptious self. In fact he didn't utter a word. Oh dear: was he worried that people had already seen the story on London tonight, or was it because the dispute is not going the way he wanted it to?