Clyde Tunnel workers vote for strike action
Keir Greenaway, GMB Scotland's senior organiser in public services, said council staff were tired of being treated as "the poor relations in our public services."He added: "Council workers have again been forced to fight for fair pay while watching others in the public sector, NHS Scotland, for example, being made acceptable offers."The team at the Clyde Tunnel keep Scotland's biggest city moving - only one example of the essential services delivered by our members."Without their expertise and experience, one of the country's most important roads could close with untold disruption."Council pay is negotiated nationally between unions and Cosla.GMB Scotland have called for a 6.5% pay increase instead of the proposed 3%, saying it would work out as the equivalent of a £1 an hour rise.An estimated 65,000 cars, vans and lorries use the Clyde Tunnel every weekday.Glasgow City Council and the Scottish government have been contacted for comment.
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BBC News
26 minutes ago
- BBC News
EU and US agree trade deal, with 15% tariffs for European exports to America
The United States and European Union have reached a trade deal, ending a months-long standoff between two of the world's key economic make-or-break negotiations between President Donald Trump and European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen in Scotland, the pair agreed on a blanket US tariff on all EU goods of 15%. That is half the 30% import tax rate Trump had threatened to implement starting on Friday. Trump said the 27-member bloc would open its markets to US exporters with zero per cent tariffs on certain der Leyen also hailed the deal, saying it would bring stability for both allies, who together account for almost a third of global trade. Trump has threatened tariffs against major US trade partners in a bid to reorder the global economy and trim the American trade well as the EU, he has also struck tariff agreements with the UK, Japan, Indonesia and Vietnam, although he has not achieved his goal of "90 deals in 90 days".Sunday's deal was announced after private talks between Trump and Von der Leyen at his Turnberry golf course in South - who is on a five-day visit to Scotland - said following a brief meeting with the European Commission president: "We have reached a deal. It's a good deal for everybody.""It's going to bring us closer together," he der Leyen also hailed it as a "huge deal", after "tough negotiations".Under the agreement, Trump said the EU would boost its investment in the US by $600bn (£446bn), purchase hundreds of billions of dollars of American military equipment and spend $750bn on investment in American liquified natural gas, oil and nuclear fuels would, Von der Leyen said, help reduce European reliance on Russian power sources."I want to thank President Trump personally for his personal commitment and his leadership to achieve this breakthrough," she said."He is a tough negotiator, but he is also a dealmaker."The US president also said a 50% tariff he has implemented on steel and aluminium globally would stay in sides can paint this agreement as something of a the EU, the tariffs could have been worse: it is not as good as the UK's 10% tariff rate, but is the same as the 15% rate that Japan the US it equates to the expectation of roughly $90bn of tariff revenue into government coffers – based on last year's trade figures, plus there's hundreds of billions of dollars of investment now due to come into the US. How are trade deals actually negotiated?They made America's clothing. Now they are getting punished for itIn pictures: President Trump's private visit to Scotland Trade in goods between the EU and US totalled about $975.9bn last year. Last year the US imported about $606bn in goods from the EU and exported around $ imbalance, or trade deficit, is a sticking point for Trump. He says trade relationships like this mean the US is "losing".If he had followed through on tariffs against Europe, import taxes would have been levied on products from Spanish pharmaceuticals to Italian leather, German electronics and French EU had said it was prepared to retaliate with tariffs on US goods including car parts, Boeing planes and Prime Minister Keir Starmer plans his own meeting with Trump at Turnberry on will be in Aberdeen on Tuesday, where his family has another golf course and is opening a third next president and his sons plan to help cut the ribbon on the new fairway.
Daily Mail
26 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
STEPHEN DAISLEY: The out-of-touch political dreamers who've now been handed a rude awakening by reality
Ten years and a few months ago, I was dispatched to Paisley to try to interview Mhairi Black. I say 'try to' because everywhere we went someone would interrupt to tell the 20 year-old they were voting for her. It's not easy grilling a candidate on currency options for an independent Scotland when every few minutes a passing stranger suddenly downs their Tesco bags and asks for a selfie. This was the eve of the 2015 general election and the SNP was poised to sweep Labour from its west-central heartlands. Nicola Sturgeon was selling out the Hydro. Black was about to become the youngest MP since the Great Reform Act. I still had hair. It was another Scotland. A decade on, Black says she's done with the SNP and is no longer a member. She pinpoints 'capitulation on LGBT rights, trans rights in particular' as her reason for leaving, though adds: 'I thought the party could be doing better about Palestine as well'. Much as I don't share Black's views on gender or Gaza – or a great deal else, for that matter – I respect them. They're sincerely held. If you're going to hate anyone in politics, don't hate the ones who disagree with you on principle, hate the ones prepared to agree with you on any principle just to get ahead. Unfortunately her principles are far removed from those of the median voter, who remains baffled by the notion that someone can 'identify' into a different sex and even more baffled as to how this became a priority for politicians across the land. Many feel strongly about the deaths in Gaza but for most voters it is nowhere near the top of their concerns, which are dominated by their family, then their social circles, then their neighbourhood, then their country. Idealists who make a virtue of empathising more with those on the other side of the world get very angry about this. They even invented a term for it, 'hierarchy of death', which seems superfluous when we already had a term for it: human nature. For the SNP to have clung onto Black's membership subs, it would have had to return to a subject (trans rights) which has caused it no end of internal division and political misery, and adopt an even more strident stance on Israel's military response to the Palestinians' October 7 invasion and murder, rape and abduction of its citizens. The SNP is a political party, not a moral philosophy seminar. It exists to win elections and, in theory, achieve Scottish independence. What votes would it win by taking Black's advice? What votes is it at risk of losing by not? The former Paisley and Renfrewshire South MP comes close to identifying the problem herself, when she says: 'If anything, I'm probably a bit more Left-wing than I have been. I don't think I have changed all that much. I feel like the party needs to change a lot more.' The SNP does have to change, but not in the direction Black wants. The Nationalists and most other parties have spent the past decade or so breenging off on a tangent about trans rights, systemic racism, Donald Trump and the rest. A correction was long overdue. This agenda lacked popular consent and stoked resentment among both those who opposed it fiercely and those who protested over so much time and effort being frittered away. The Supreme Court judgment in For Women Scotland has helped immeasurably. Party leaders and policy-makers were able to point to the ruling and pass responsibility onto the justices. They weren't backsliding, the court was clarifying the law. For John Swinney, this has been a blessed opportunity to ditch positions he went along with at the time, I've no doubt against his better judgment, but which he knows have gravely damaged his party's standing with the public. A man with more gumption would have stood up and said something when it mattered, but if Swinney isn't much of a leader – and he certainly isn't – nor is he alone in that category. During the initial consultation stage for reforming the Gender Recognition Act, a senior politician in one party admitted to me that they didn't understand the issue, or why it was a priority, but they'd be voting for it because they had been told to. Politics is the trade of dreamers and cynics and while Mhairi Black might be wrong about everything at least she's sincere about it. She isn't the only dreamer to be rudely awakened lately by political reality. Maggie Chapman has found herself dumped as the Greens' lead candidate in North East Scotland, replaced by Guy Ingerson, ex oil-and-gas worker turned Net Zero enthusiast. According to a pet theory of mine, that makes it unlikely that Chapman will be re-elected next May. The theory: a person's likelihood to vote for the Scottish Greens correlates with their proximity to a Pret A Manger. Edinburgh and Glasgow, home to 11 and six branches of the posh sandwich chain respectively, just so happen to be the Greens' best and second-best performing areas on the regional lists. Aberdeen, with just two, lags far behind in Green support. Whether or not my theory holds water (or overpriced coffee), Chapman's Holyrood career appears to be over after years of headline-grabbing pronouncements. Her principles also deserve respect. Not because they're sincerely held but because we should remain open to ideas from other planets. When the landmark ruling was handed down in For Women Scotland, Chapman attended a rally to denounce the 'bigotry, prejudice and hatred coming from the Supreme Court'. She once told an interviewer that allowing eight year olds to change their legal sex was something that 'in principle we should be exploring'. Following the October 7 attack on Israel, she shared a tweet saying the murderous rampage was not terrorism but 'decolonisation'. Yes, her views are deranged, but the more pertinent question is how these came to be the views of someone elected to make sure Scots can see a doctor, find a good school for their children, and not get mugged at knifepoint. The answer is that ideologues like Chapman are not interested in all that boring, quotidian stuff that fixates middle-class taxpayers. Simply ghastly people, those bourgeois types, with their petrol-guzzling cars, their authoritarian demands for more police on the streets, and their grasping fixation with ambition and acquisition. Don't they know there are more important issues in the world? There are far too many in Holyrood or keen to get there who think like this. For them, life is just one long university debating society match, in which enlightened elites like them exchange barbs and bon mots over affairs of state. The little people might fret about bills and savings and leaving an inheritance for their children, but they are above such vulgar materialism. They are here to change the world, you know. In my observation, those most keen to change the world tend to have the least experience of it. They make terrible politicians because they quickly find out the world doesn't work the way they want and they resent the voters for that. If the voters set the agenda in politics, Mhairi Black and Maggie Chapman wouldn't be the only ones in our insular, self-righteous governing class that would be stampeding for the exit. Democracy is still the most radical idea of all. Maybe one day we'll give it a try.
Telegraph
26 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Convenient timing for a trade deal, I suggested. Only you would think that, Trump replied
The White House press pool had already spent 25 minutes listening to Donald Trump and Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, set out the terms of talks at the start of their meeting. We had been ushered back to a cramped holding room, equipped with coffee and cookies and too few power sockets. The European journalists had just been bussed out of the US president's Trump Turnberry golf club while the 13 of us in the White House pool filed our stories. Then we got the call that we were heading back. It sent us scrambling for notebooks and audio recorders before running helter-skelter back to the Donald J Trump ballroom. There could be only one reason. 'So we have good news,' Mr Trump said from his chair in front of the vast picture windows looking out on his famous golf course and dunes. 'We reached a deal.' A small audience including his sons Don Jr and Eric as well as other White House staff applauded. It came as a surprise in the moment. The burly cameraman behind me was still panting from our sudden exertion. Barely an hour earlier, Mr Trump put the chances of a deal at 50-50. But to the canny, the signs pointing to a deal had always been there. The meeting with Mrs Von der Leyen was a last-minute addition to Mr Trump's trip to Scotland. He did not even have his top two trade negotiators on Air Force One. But on Saturday they flew out to join him. Something was obviously in the air. And then Mr Trump, in that first press 'spray' (as it is called in White House lingo), had even hinted a deal was close. 'We have a good chance of getting it resolved,' he said. 'We'll probably know in about an hour.' This was the deal he wanted; 'the biggest of all the deals', as he put it. He flew out of Washington on Friday dogged by questions about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and just what his administration knew about the dead paedophile. Deals with Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines had been announced last week but hadn't budged the news media, which kept up a steady drip drip drip of headlines on a scandal that should have ended when Epstein died by suicide in a jail cell. The five-day trip to Scotland was a chance to escape the crisis and spend time at his beloved golf clubs in Ayrshire and then Aberdeenshire, where he will open a new course on Tuesday. Now he also has a major win, that will bring investment and cash to the US. Could it be that the sudden breakthrough was the product of the need for a big win that could change the media conversation? That was the gist of my question to Mr Trump. 'Only you would think that,' he said with half a smile, 'on a day … which is good for European business and American business.'
