Campaign news

Falkirk: a fuss about nothing

24th January 2014

Falkirk: a fuss about nothing

Stevie Deans was convenor at Ineos, Grangemouth, and also chair of Falkirk West Labour Party. The efforts of his union Unite to get a working class candidate selected at Falkirk were sabotaged by his employer, who seized his laptop and leaked stories about his emails to the press. Rumours of malfeasance at Falkirk LP were stoked, to their shame, by some Labour Party members. This muddied the waters of the selection process and led to a Labour Party report into the affair. The Falkirk issue was also the trigger for Ed Miliband to question the link between Labour and the unions. In the end the Party found there was no case to answer at Falkirk.

Stevie’s employer was the billionaire Ratcliffe, who also locked out the workforce at Grangemouth and imposed massive cuts in wages and conditions on the workforce. The police, after wasting months of their time, have also concluded that the investigation into Stevie’s emails was a fuss about nothing. Here is the statement from Unite.

Unite has welcomed Police Scotland’s conclusion that there was ‘no evidence of any criminality’ in a cache of emails held on the work computer of Stevie Deans. The Unite rep was suspended from his work at Grangemouth over claims that he used company time for political campaigning work. His emails were leaked to the Sunday Times and subsequently handed to Police Scotland by his former employer Ineos.
Unite general secretary Len McCluskey said: “Unite has been vindicated in consistently saying that no wrong doing or criminality has taken place and welcome Police Scotland’s conclusion. It is shameful that the police’s time has been wasted by vexatious complaints and their attentions diverted from catching real criminals and solving real crimes. Stevie Deans is a decent and honourable man who has been smeared and hounded with a callous disregard for him and his family by those who should know better. The anti-union hysteria whipped up by certain sections of the media and their friends to pursue a spiteful agenda, has been shocking. Their witch-hunt has been exposed to be without foundation and a lie.”