Bit of a Weird One.

Yesterday (22/5) representatives of British Airways (BA) and Unite the Union were holding talks at the conciliation service ACAS. The purpose of the talks was to bring and end to the long running dispute between the two but was broken up after activists from the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) stormed the building. That was so bizarre that it took me a while to get my head around it.

For those of you that don't know the SWP is basically a MI5 front organisation. Their purpose is to gather up political dissent and channel it into pointless forms of protest like endless A-B marches and writing dull letters into the party's equally dull newspaper the Socialist Worker. They are also trying to seize control of the Unite union by getting one of their people elected as general secretary when the post becomes unified.

Therefore the purpose of yesterday's action appears to be an attempt to make Unite look bad. This is done in the public's eye by making them look like rabble rousers and in the membership's eye by scuppering talks that could well lead to a positive settlement in the dispute.

As for how they found their way into the building I think they just found the hole in the wall. The ACAS building is not a protected site so anyone can just wander in off the street. If fifty of them decided to do it at the same time there's not really much the building security can do to stop them.