It has recently been agreed by the government after intensive lobbying by the entire trade union movement that agency workers should get the same rate of pay as directly employed workers after 12 weeks. Has it gone far enough?  I believe the legislation should apply from day one and should also include the same terms and conditions as directly employed full time workers.

At present gas prices are going up by 13.6% in Britain. They’re rising by just 2% in the Netherlands. Prices are 25% higher here than on the continent. By the end of the year household bills will be £1,323 a year. This is twice as high as when Labour was elected in 1997. Some estimate household bills could hit £1,500 next winter.

The bosses are over the moon. “Boris Johnson’s London will be a Tory laboratory” trumpets the Daily Telegraph (May 4th).  That makes David Cameron their Doctor Frankenstein. Don’t let anybody fall for the line that it can’t get worse after Blair and Brown. Already one of Johnson’s top aide’s has had to resign for saying about immigrants who don’t like Tory policies "Well, let them go (back) if they don't like it here."

Terry was a larger than life figure and a fine representative of the Liverpool working class. A ‘salt of the earth’ man who dedicated his efforts to the cause of the working class. Always smiling and joking, he was always seen wearing his black leather jacket, even in Parliament, a place he pretty much hated. He served his time there from 1983, when he was elected along with Dave Nellist and later Pat Wall as part of the Militant trio, until 1992. This was the culmination of decades of work by Militant supporters in the Merseyside labour movement. They had refused to abandon the struggle within the Labour Party.

Brief as it was woeful, Wendy Alexander’s leadership of the Labour Party in Scotland has come to an end. Alexander was forced to resign after being given a one day ban from parliament for breaking rules regarding donations for her campaign to become Labour Party leader. Her actions were illegal – no doubt about it. No one is quite sure why such large sums of cash were needed for what in effect became a coronation, given the lack of an opposition candidate.

In the Mental Health Trust where I work, now a Foundation Trust, the primary anxiety for workers is not about pay but about the future of their jobs. Of course, rising prices and a lousy pay deal - coupled with the Trust's intention to hold an across the board 'banding review' - piles on the pressure, but the fact that repeated structural changes, resulting in cuts in the management structure, have saved no real money and, now, all vacant posts have been abolished (rather than frozen, as has been usual in the past) has drawn attention to a very pressing threat to jobs.

THE TYNE and Wear Metro is a public-sector success story and should be kept that way, delegates at the annual conference of Britain's biggest rail union insisted today. As RMT's AGM called on the government to implement Labour policy on public ownership, RMT general secretary Bob Crow and Northern TUC secretary Kevin Rowan issued a joint plea for an end to the threat to fragment and privatise the northeast's Metro network.