Both runners-up received £1,000.A £5,000 award, sponsored by Deloitte, for the best portrait by a photographer aged 25 or under was won by David Yeo, 19, for a portrait of his three cousins.. To tourists, the man in a Spider-man costume perched precariously on the cabin of a 120-foot Thameside crane yesterday was most probably a prankster or a showman emulating David Blaine. At the same time there is a tension in the photograph.”The following day she was leaving Scotland with her parents to live in Manchester. I don’t know whether Mairead sensed the family’s trepidation of this, but she seems apprehensive and hesitant.”The second prize winner was another Scot, Victor Albrow, 51, of Edinburgh, with a portrait of the red-headed five-year-old twin sons of a friend.

She’s wearing a Victorian-style party dress and she resembles a porcelain doll. Employers were willing to pay half of the increase next week, as a gesture of goodwill.. A grandfather who taught himself photography after he was given a camera at the age of 30 has won the inaugural £15,000 Schweppes photographic portrait prize. Local authority employers claimed it was always known that the deal had to be ratified by the Audit Commission before it could be paid in full.John Ransford, one of the employers’ chief negotiators, said that negotiations between the two sides had been proceeding well. The firefighters’ dispute erupted again yesterday when union leaders refused to endorse a pay deal which brought the long-running conflict to an end.
The Fire Brigades Union is seeking an urgent meeting with local authority employers after it emerged that the next phase of a wage increase will be paid in two stages.Firefighters will receive a 3.5 per cent rise on Friday and a further increase of 3.5 per cent in the New Year.Employers said the deal had to be ratified by the Audit Commission which could not be done fully until the New Year.But the union said it had expected the increase to be paid in full this week and that news of employers’ intention to stage the increase only emerged in an e-mail sent on Friday.The executive will meet again on Thursday to consider its next move. Last year, a mere 6,000 days were lost through walkouts.That period of calm between union and management came to an abrupt end a fortnight ago when employees in the capital staged an official 24-hour strike, originally over disputes in London allowances.The Royal Mail has even sought the guidance of an American management guru who specialised in “spiritual guidance” in an attempt to sort things out. It appears Mr Barrett may well have been casting pearls before swine..

Richard Barrett, a self-styled “World-Renowned Visionary”, attempted to transform the business through the deployment of “values-based Corporate Transformation Tools”. Relations between the organisation and its employees were “dire”, Lord Sawyer concluded.Following the study, there was a lull in hostilities as both sides agreed to address the fundamental problems that afflicted their organisation. In the financial year to 2000-2001, more than 62,000 working days were lost through walkouts and only 5 per cent were sanctioned by the Communication Workers Union.In the latest dispute, the leadership of the union clearly sympathised with the strikers and their issues, but control was even more clearly in the hands of local activists.Three years ago, the Royal Mail enlisted the expertise of Lord Sawyer, a former general secretary of the Labour Party and ex-union official, in an attempt to bring an end to the industrial anarchy.Lord Sawyer, who chaired a three-man inquiry team, found that the attitude of union activists was characterised by “old fashioned class war” and that management’s approach was often “high-handed or insensitive”. The organisation also gets more than its fair share of militant activists who are attracted by the high degree of unionisation of the employees.Over the past decade or so, industrial action by Post Office employees has made up a substantial proportion of the working days lost through strikes in the British economy.It would be a mistake to think that reluctant postal workers were being bullied into industrial action by the union’s national leadership. There is no guarantee that the settlement will actually “settle” anything.The Royal Mail’s 165,000 postal workers have the reputation as Britain’s most militant workforce and the organisation’s junior and middle managers are known to be adept at provoking them.The somewhat authoritarian sub-culture among the lower reaches of management is thought to have its roots in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War when the Post Office recruited non-commissioned officers at supervisory grades. The second delivery accounts for just 4 per cent of letter volumes but 20 per cent of Royal Mail’s costs.Despite the agreement to end the unofficial dispute, it will leave a legacy of bitterness in an organisation where employee relations have been among the worst in the country. They had been cut from £1.1m a day in 2001 to £750,000 in 2002 and figures for the first six months of this year, to be published later this month, are expected to show a further improvement.The organisation is aiming to reduce costs by £1.4bn and cut 30,000 jobs by the end of next year to offset the introduction of competition which will see its monopoly abolished altogether by April 2007.On the plus side, the ending of the dispute will accelerate the introduction of single postal deliveries across the country – the biggest element in the cost-saving plan.