Flannelled Fool In Draughty Glasshouse

There was a frisson of excitement among right-wing union bashers yesterday morning, as they thought they had caught someone on the left making a mistake. Far from the usual silence, the yah-boo boys of the so-called Taxpayers’ Alliance (TPA) went into sneering overdrive. And none of their pals was more vocal than the flannelled fool Henry Cole at the Guido Fawkes blog.

I don't have to know my subject, cos I'm on telly!

Cole Tweeted that Carl Roper had been “busted peddling lies about union funding”, though what appears to have happened is no more than the kind of slip that is understandable in the heat of the moment. And Cole himself had earlier asserted that Facility Time meant “shyster unions creaming off the taxpayer”, which is an awfully big slip, and is also totally untrue.

Just a teensy over-reaction here ...

As I keep saying, Facility Time payments accrue to those working in the service of the organisations making the payments. The payments do not accrue to Trade Unions. Workplace representatives, who do receive some paid time off for a defined set of duties, have been previously asserted by Cole to be “Union officials”, but they are not, as they do not work for any union.

... and downright intemperate language here

It is symptomatic of the sheer emptiness of the case being peddled by the TPA and the Fawkes blog that they should expend so much energy jumping down someone’s throat, rather than put a case against Facility Time. This may not be unconnected to the fact that the TPA’s case has been shown time and again to be utterly without merit, and laced with falsehood and misinformation.

Cole has already sprayed his credibility up the wall with a series of whoppers, including trying to pass off the launch of the so-called Trade Union Reform Campaign (TURC) as some kind of massively oversubscribed success, when not many MPs turned up. And he compounded that one by dishonestly suggesting that the campaign enjoyed the support of cricketer Darren Gough.

And those aren’t the only examples of the creativity of the Cole imagination: there was another hilariously inept anti-union rant at the end of last year, to add to his inept call over Phonehackgate and his more recent attempts to smear me, which have only thrown his petulance and stupidity into sharper relief. But he does make one interesting assertion on the Facility Time question.

“I’ve been working on the Facility Time story [for] 18 months. I’m going to continue to do so until its conclusion” he tells. This assurance is most welcome. So, before he next tries to suggest that others are the ones peddling the falsehood and misinformation, perhaps he could do everyone a favour, especially those on his own side, and try to understand what he is talking about.

Because he gives the impression that he does not. Another fine mess, once again.