About Fair Pay

This website was established in 2007 as the 'Fair Pay Action Group'.

At the time, it was the official website of FPAG, a group of council workers who banded together to fight the pay cuts delivered in the name of Single Status job evaluation. FPAG gained attention from the media; organised protests, regional meetings, talks with MPs and Councillors, national petitions, and more.

However, the measures we protested against were ratified anyway, and the website fell dormant for a while. In 2008 your humble author and webmaster eventually resigned his position at the council with no other job to go to.

In 2009 my ex-colleagues' pay and terms and conditions of service came under threat again, so I began updating the website again..

As time went on, the website expanded to include all aspects of government, and then other news and comment. This website is no longer the official site of FPAG - FPAG doesn't really exist anymore. Today, the site is run by just me, Steve.

I've remained unemployed since 2008, and with all this time on my hands, I've spent a lot of time reading the news and learning about things I didn't have much time to understand before, like politics and economics. Much of the content of this site results from my learning about these subjects, and wanting to share it with everyone - or at least point out some of the odd or misleading things in the mainstream media and say, "huh?".

Fair Pay is independent, unbiased and is not affiliated to or associated with any political party or any other group or company.

Accuracy

I make every effort to ensure that what I write is factually correct, but mistakes will sometimes slip through. I will correct factual errors if I've discovered I've made one, though. Apart from the Skynet one. It makes for a nice chicken-and-egg joke at my expense. Corrections will be noted with a footnote at the bottom of the article, though I reserve the right to make unannotated minor corrections that do not significantly alter the meaning of the article (e.g. minor typos and keyboard fumbles) - especially on grey-headed articles.

Articles that carry a green-coloured heading are factual and held to a higher standard of accuracy and correction. Other articles carry a grey-coloured heading.

About the Author

Hi. I don't really like talking about myself to the entire world if I can help it, but I suppose I should say something. My name's Steve Wilson. I was born and currently live in the North-East, but I spent most of my working life at various Midlands Councils, working my way up from general dogsbody to being responsible for some quite difficult technical/IT stuff.

Technical

The first version of this site was a basic site with a Wordpress blog bolted on. Throughout most of 2009, it was pure XHTML1.0 Strict/CSS, written using only Notepad (uphill, in the snow). As of July 2010, the site runs on a CMS (Content Management System) that I wrote myself using the Python programming language. (Kids these days who write blogs using Wordpress or Blogger don't they're born!) Seriously though, I had some specific requirements for my CMS that would have meant either writing my own or adapting one of the existing ones. Given that I knew nothing about the codebase of popular CMS (e.g. Wordpress) and wasn't very familiar with the language they're written in, it was almost as easy to just write my own from scratch (and a useful learning experience, too). WDD40 (the provisional name for the CMS) currently weighs in at a little over 1,000 lines of Python, though there's still some work to do.

Copyright

All text is copyright Fair Pay/Steve Wilson, unless otherwise credited.

All images are copyright Fair Pay/Steve Wilson or licensed from a third party (and are therefore also subject to copyright) unless otherwise credited.

External Links

Fairpay is not responsible for the content of external links. However, links to non-mainstream websites are virus-checked prior to publication.

In keeping with the independent editorial stance of this website, I generally don't link to commercial websites - but if I do, it's because the content is genuinely useful or relevant. I don't use money-making affiliate links, and if that changes in future I'll probably mark them in a different colour or something so that any readers who hate me can avoid giving me any money if they wish.