Marsha has already blogged on the excellent Public Service Not Private Profit fringe meeting, and General Secretary Dave Prentis' speech. So I won't repeat her comments.

Currently Francis Prideaux from St Mary's Paddington is moving an excellent amendment to the NEC's motion on the economy. Francis.makes the excellent point that the government is not in favour of privatising everything. As the Northern Rock debacle showed, while they are privatising profits they are determined to nationalise the costs and the losses. Francis' amendment points out that the Labour conference already has agreed policies with the support of Unison which would turn that agenda on its head. The question, of course, is what do we do to get those policies implemented.

Outside Unison conference at the end of the first session, delegates and visitors from Greenwich branch protest in defence of four activists currently facing disciplinary action over a leaflet they produced criticising the union's Standing Orders Committee.

There is always something to make getting in to conference more difficult than it should be. Often it is forgetting my photograph for the conference badge and finding the nearest photobooth is a mile across town.

Today it was the fact that I'm not here officially so haven't sent in a visitor application in advance. I did hand it in at 8.30 this morning but apparently the conference office won't be able to process it until 11 because of having to deal with delegates' problems first. Fair enough. I think I'm first in today's queue though.

This means I won't be inside to see our branch challenge standing orders. That's one of the conference traditions - somebody has to do it, and this year it will be us, I think. The Standing Orders Committee have ruled out of order our branch's amendment affirming that branches should have the right to make recommendations during member ballots and consultations. SOC seem to be saying that the rules delegate the power to decide this question to service groups, and Kate has worked out that if that interpretation stands we have already won, thanks to a vote at health conference two months ago. However our branch view is that national conference should decide, so we will be pushing to get the amendment back on the agenda.

I know Marsha and Jon have been here for a few days already but UNISON conference gets underway in Bournemouth tomorrow. Local government delegates are therefore being joined here this evening by those from health branches. Kate is, of course, spending conference on the platform. Literally, as she hasn't been allocated a single speech, but I will be on the balcony in a strictly unofficial capacity. Its been a while since I attended a unison conference without any official responsibilty so I'm looking forward to it.

I will try to report on the significant decisions and debates over the next four days. And if you are in Bournemouth and fancy a cuppa, get in touch.

The official results of the UNISON SGE elections are now published on the UNISON website. Or rather, the make-up of the new SGEs are. The results, if by that we mean, the scores for the various candidates, don't seem to be published anywhere.

I hope they will be soon - it's a basic part of democracy that everyone knows not just who won the elections, but how many people voted, and who they voted for.

There's been some discussion in UNISON blogs about the turnout, and specifically, the high number of spoilt papers. John Gray is concerned there is a problem, but MarshaJane has spotted, as I had, that the number of ballot papers 'spoiled' is much, much higher in regions where there is more than one seat to fill.

I received the election results for the UNISON Health Service Group Executive yesterday. I'm honoured to be able to report that members in the East Midlands region have elected me to represent them for a further two years:

Nick Holden 1739

Ann Ashworth 780

So I'd like to say a big thank you to all those members in the region who supported me, and also to Ann, who conducted a friendly and honest campaign - elections where the competing candidates can discuss the issues in a positive manner, as Ann and I did at health conference back in April, can only make the union stronger. I hope Ann's talents can be put to use by our region in some other role, now that she's not to be representing us on the SGE.

Irish nurses, who held a campaign of ground-breaking industrial action last summer in support of a campaign for significant pay rises and a shorter working week , have agreed at their conference this week to ballot members for industrial action if upcoming talks with the Irish government do not generate a 10% pay rise.

Last year's dispute, which won a commitment from the Government to reduce the working week of nurses to the same as that of other health workers in Ireland and also a pay rise worth 10% over two years, was only ended on a very close vote to accept the offer.

As Leo Colston said, the past is a foreign country. But in these days of cheap international air travel, that shouldn't stop us visiting.  There's been a blogroll link for some time on 4glengate.net to the blog of Michael Walker, a former COHSE activist, which contains an archive of documents and reflections on the history and achievements of COHSE - the Confederation Of Health Service Employees. It's an impressive archive, and every health worker, every UNISON member, should spend some time reading up on it.

This morning, I've been thinking about the UNISON consultative ballot on the below-inflation-for-three-years NHS pay offer which is due to start this week. When we discussed the pay offer at UNISON health conference last month, and subsequently, according to reports from colleagues around the country, officers of UNISON and those lay members who want us to accept the offer have been at pains to stress that rejecting the offer would necessarily imply taking industrial action. Not just industrial action but sustained industrial action. I think that word is included just to pour scorn on those public sector workers who have already held a one day strike in support of their campaign for better pay, but scorn in such a situation is the chocolate pot calling the kettle black. At least, as many of my colleagues in Leicester keep telling me, the teachers are doing something. 

As I couldn't get down to London today for the lobby of Parliament, I've taken the unusual step of writing to my Tory MP, Edward Garnier. I don't often write to him, what with him being a Tory, and a lawyer and what with our last meaningful contact being me standing for Labour against him in 1997, but since I couldn't go in person to support Karen Reissmann, I figured that I shouldn't let him off the hook.

Thanks to the excellent 'write to them' website, I've just sent him this message... 

An email arrived this morning, while I was reading some interesting discussion on the fall-out from the elections and trying to work out how to make the unions move fast enough in the right direction to stave off a Tory victory at the next General Election. It didn't exactly inspire me, although I suppose it was supposed to.

It came from the Labour Party, and was titled, Campaigning events in your area. A good start, I thought, since the Labour Party has done eff all actual campaigning in my area for over a decade. So rather than assigning it to the spam folder, I read on, enthusiasm rapidly waning: