We're meeting in Manchester, electing committees and so on for the coming year, and also making plans for the pay campaign. Unless there's been a significant new pay offer this will be the meeting which agrees the ballot timetable for the NHS pay dispute.

Here is my report to UNISON members in the East Midlands of the meeting I attended on Wednesday of the Health SGE.

It was an emergency meeting to discuss the pay campaign. Contrary to the report on the UNISON website we didn't agree to defer a decision on balloting - there was no proposal to initiate a ballot during July or August because of the difficulties in getting a decent campaign and turnout during the summer. It's an indication of how poorly organised the union is in health, I think, that we haven't moved any faster towards a ballot - if we had done, we could now be taking action alongside the postal workers.

As Jon says, good luck to all the workers taking strike action against cowboy employer Fremantle in North London.

For details of the dispute see the Barnet UNISON blog.

You can sign the online petition.

Also find out if your MP is one of the 50 who have signed the Early Day Motion in support of the workers.

Good luck comrades!

National demonstration, in London, in defence of the NHS. Moved from 13 October in order that it could take place in Trafalgar Square.

I just created a countdown timer for the blog (let your eyes slide to the right, a little) to tell us how long we have left to organise the national demonstration in defence of the NHS which is planned for October 13th.

It turns out there are 99 days to go.

There is a meeting set for July 16th where the precise venue and other details will be decided, and hopefully national UNISON publicity will start to appear shortly after that. But there's no reason at all why we can't get on with other jobs in the meantime - members of other unions could be getting their own unions to declare support for the event, and union branches could be booking transport and informing members. After all, for branches outside of London, it doesn't matter much whether the venue is Finsbury Park or Kennington Park - members will either come to a national demonstration or they won't, and coach companies will take a booking for a trip to "London" without quibbling too much over the precise destination at this stage. After all, it's still 99 days away!

So this is how Gordon Brown plans to repay unions like UNISON which tried to ingratiate themselves by nominating him in the leadership election shortly after it was clear that he wouldn't face any competition: by preventing them from embarrassing him at future Labour Party conferences. Why am I not surprised?

This is good news - although I'm not sure that Sophie and Gregory agree.

Other peole have already made some valuable comments about the UNISON NEC election results.

I'm very pleased also for Paul Harper, Branch Secretary of NHS Logistics Branch in Maidstone, who has made a significant impact onto the SGE since becoming one of the Admin & Clerical Sector Committee's reps. He'll be able to do a lot more now he'll be coming to the meetings as a full member of the NEC.

I've added a new website to the links list this evening, and it's such an interesting site that I want to draw specific attention to it. Called Seachange, it's an information resource about nurses, nursing and trade unionism. It's so refreshing to find a website which uneqivocally views nurses as workers - with the same need to organise as miners, dockers, postalworkers or anyone else - and not angels. Nurses don't need professional footballers or any other millionaires to spare some loose change to make up for crap wages in the NHS. They need to organise, and learn some lessons from, for instance, the Irish nurses' strike, on which more later...