At the end of last week I had meetings with Kamol Kamoltrakul, one of the Thai journalists being sued by Tesco's and with Foreign Office Minister Kim Howells over threats to journalists and trade unionists in Colombia. Both showed the lengths the union goes to to deliver practical support and solidarity to those fighting for freedom of expression around the world.
I was also up in Liverpool at the Post and Echo in a meeting with management at the Trinity Mirror-owned papers seeking to break the impasse in our current pay talks.
At the weekend I was out leafleting in Tooting for the London elections.
Yesterday we had our annual Campaigns and Communications 'away-day' - a chance to review our work over the past year and consider all the motions passed by the annual conference and draw up an action plan for the coming 18 months. The usual likely suspects top the agenda - public service broadcasting, developing the journalism matters campaign, the work experience campaign, improving our liason with student members, developing our web presence and so on. We all now have a daunting pile of work to get through!
This morning I had a telephone conference with the union's National Officers to update them on the latest situation in the Shiv Malik case and then met with researchers at the Institute for Public Policy Research to discuss some work around public service broadcasting to help inform the political debate over top slicing the licence fee or other methods of funding PSB.
New Statesman have published the article I wrote last week as part of their May Day special on strikes. The web version doesn't have the dodgy photo of me being escorted from a picket line by a friendly police officer circa 1990.
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