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The scandal the nationals won't touch
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At the TUC last week, we were invited to discuss the difference it makes not having any labour and industrial correspondents any more. Here's one big difference.
AssetCo is a company with multi million pound contracts to own and maintain all London's and Lincolshire's fire engines. It owes millions of pounds in unpaid tax, it has had to raise £26 million long term from a share offer and another emergency £3.5 million from the bank just to avoid liquidation. It's trying to get rid of its chairman, chief executive and financial officer. It had to take its chief executive and founder to the high court to get him to vote for the financial bailout, otherwise it would already have gone under.
It's a company in meltdown - and it owns all the fire engines for London and Lincolnshire. If it goes under, we could lose all our fire engines to the company's creditors. The London Fire Brigade says there's a clause in the contract which protects the fire engines - but it won't show us the clause. When it eventually, unwillingly, released the contract, the relevant clause was "redacted."
AssetCo is also recruiting British firefighter instructors to train the military in the United Arab Emirates, and help put down pro-democracy demonstrators in Bahrain.
The blogosphere is full of it, led by David Hencke (see http://davidhencke.wordpress.com/2011/03/28/london-firefighter-firm-recruiting-brits-for-uae-military-support/.) By any standards, this is a story.
But the national papers hardly touch the story. And that, I think, is because, in the absence of labour and industrial corrs, it ends up on the city desk - and city journalists are terrified of writing anything which might bring down a company's share price.
They are also instinctively unwilling to take anything from a trade union, and it's the Fire Brigades Union which helped expose this story. When there were industrial corrs, they'd say: "It comes from the union - but it's a good story." Now city desks say: "It's a good story - but it comes from the unions."