You can't be neutral

Surely there can be no room for neutrality when some of the country's lowest-paid workers are offered a below-inflation three-year deal.

If workers were to accept a 2.5 per cent "rise" at a time when even the government's favoured and grossly underestimated consumer price index stands at 4.4 per cent, this can only add up to a cut in purchasing power and lower living standards.

Decreased purchasing power is likely to have a knock-on effect on the economy, threatening workers' jobs.

The Westminster government is obsessed with keeping earnings down - at least as far as low-paid workers are concerned - claiming that higher wages will push up inflation.

It seems impervious to the fact that inflation is already raging and that this phenomenon has had nothing to do with pay increases.

Inflation has been stoked by runaway prices for gas, electricity, petrol and diesel and a wide range of foodstuffs, while the water companies are currently lining up to impose inflation-plus price rises.

Gordon Brown appears incapable of standing up to the energy companies and the food transnational corporations, just as he and Tony Blair did nothing when rapacious bankers were recording super-profits by means of exorbitant charges and reckless speculation.

The banks would be acting just as irresponsibly but for the bursting of the subprime mortgages bubble and the effective bankruptcy of Northern Rock.

At present, they are licking their wounds, calling for government assistance and turning low-rate state loans into profits instead of helping home-buyers.

Mr Brown and his Chancellor Alistair Darling see nothing wrong with this constant cycle of super-profits boom, followed by markets crash and super-profits rebirth funded by the state, job losses and lower wages.

It's a case of heads, big business wins, and tails, working people lose.

Well, working people in the public sector have had enough of this dodgy set-up where they get the blame and poor wages, while big business gets state handouts paid for by trimming the grants payable to devolved government, including local authorities.

The problem for Scottish local authority workers and their civil servant colleagues in Scottish government and Registers of Scotland is that they are caught in the middle of a political game.

New Labour in Westminster has cut back on the grant to Holyrood and the SNP government has passed on the cuts to Scotland's local authorities.

The SNP has been happy, on many issues, to portray itself as the social-democratic party that Labour used to be, but it has failed to do so on council workers' low pay.

But neither the workers in dispute nor anyone else can accept that the role of government in Scotland should be simply to plead neutrality and to snipe politically at Westminster.

A principled stand must be taken in support of the striking staff, offering to fund higher pay and to campaign jointly with the unions for more cash from Westminster.

Failure to do so opens the SNP up to allegations of disregard for workers except as political pawns.