Congratulations to the drivers (though not the management by the sounds of it) of Eddie Stobart’s haulage firm. The Edinburgh Evening news reports that they refused extra payments of £500 each for a special assignment, when they found out that it was to strike-break against the UNITE-T&G distribution members at Tesco in Livingstone, Scotland.

UNITE-T&G’s Tony Trench said: “We think that this is an appalling way to do business – throwing large sums of money to get people to strike-break instead of sitting down and negotiating with us in an orderly fashion. We are humbly grateful to these guys who have turned down such large sums of money to support their comrades.”

Eddie Stobart always used to demand the highest standards of conduct from his drivers, wanting them to be ‘knights of the road’, to help him build a brand as industry leaders (and collect a huge fan club of strange people who like to count lorries along the way). It looks like they’ve passed the conduct test with flying colours, though maybe not in quite the way he intended.

All together now… “I want to be an Eddie Stobart driver…”

PS – Indisputedly the most useless bit of trivia I know (after ringing Stobarts’ unneccessarily helpful customer services for a bet 15 years ago) is the reason Stobart’s lorries display a small Italian flag on their side. Apparently, their main contract was an Irish run when they were a small firm, and they wanted to put an Irish flag on the side, but didn’t have any orange paint, so they used red, and stuck to the wrong colour ever since out of quirky tradition. There – now don’t go saying there’s no exclusives on this site…