ON December 23 2014, I was frantically scouring my networks for a festive story to round off a year — my first working for the Morning Star.

Then I stumbled across a Facebook post from firefighters in Cosham, a northern suburb of Portsmouth. 

A tub of Quality Street had been dropped off by their local MP, with a card “wishing you peace at Christmas.” So far, so good. 

But that MP just happened to be the Tory government’s fire minister, responsible for pension reforms forcing them to work an extra five years — which had prompted a wave of national strike action in England.

The local Fire Brigades Union branch pledged to donate the tin to a foodbank, “so we can make a good Christmas for those who really need a bit of goodwill.”

The MP in question was Penny Mordaunt, who was made defence secretary this week after the shambolic sacking of Gavin Williamson.

Will she have more tact in appeasing Britain’s pretty disgruntled armed forces?

Tickled pink

SPOKEN-WORD artist Tickle McNicholl was a class act at the International Workers’ Day gig at the Rum Shack in Govanhill on Wednesday. 

He’d only had an hour’s notice from compere Jim Monaghan, the legendary community organiser who is himself an acclaimed poet, to step in for an act who dropped out. 

But as he moved from Marx to memes at breakneck speed, McNicholl, who has recently moved to the Govanhill, channelled everything which makes this district Glasgow’s beating heart.

All to play for at PCS

AT the Rum Shack that night, I bumped into PCS Scotland chief Lynn Henderson. Straight after finishing her year as Scottish TUC president, Henderson went right into an election for the No 2 job in her own union.

Her Step Aside Brother campaign has pushed for unions to make room for women to take on positions, from the ground up. As the ballot draws to a close, insiders expect a close result between Henderson and the incumbent Chris Baugh. Can she make it over the line?

A tale of a hub

I WISH I was surprised that Theresa May’s landmark announcement to the Scottish Conservative conference yesterday was a “global underwater hub” for Aberdeen. 

But hubs are very much in vogue. God knows why, given the associations. In the mid-2000s, they were the buzzword for cheaply revamped school canteens, and more recently big newspaper groups have slashed jobs and outsourced subediting to so-called hubs, hundreds of miles from regional patches. 

The use of the term as a by-word for cuts doesn’t end there: the SNP government has talked about developing exciting new hubs in the wreckage of Michelin’s withdrawal from Dundee, and the proposed closure of the Springburn railway works. 

The whole world has gone hub-tastic. It’s a lot to ask in this day and age, but can’t we just have some old-fashioned secure employment instead?

A new reader…

THE Star has a new reader in Scotland — so please extend a warm welcome to Stephen Kerr, the Tory MP for Stirling, who quoted one of my reports from the Scottish TUC in the Commons this week. 

“I would not often choose to quote from the Morning Star,” he told his colleagues. 

“Frankly, I have not often even perused a copy of it. I know that opposition members are disappointed to hear that I am not a regular subscriber.” 

The SNP’s Chris Stephens jumped in to tell Kerr that “if he buys the Morning Star today, he will find a column in the name of my good self on blacklisting, which I recommend to him.” The struggle takes many forms.