BRITAIN’S best-known luxury car may be best-known for carrying icons of the past. But Thunderbirds, it should be remembered, was set in the mid-2060s.

Now Eva Bolander (pictured), the SNP Lord Provost of Glasgow, will be ferried around the schemes of Strathclyde in a six-figure Rolls-Royce Ghost, “gifted” to the city council by an anonymous philanthropist. Very good, m’lady.

This week was also the 50th anniversary of the machinists’ walkout at Ford’s Dagenham and Halewood sites. The strike, now immortalised by the film Made in Dagenham, is widely credited as the driving force behind the Equal Pay Act.

True of course, but some Glaswegians are pondering whether the 1944 strike at Rolls-Royce in Hillington has been forgotten.

Back then, women workers had been drafted into the aircraft engine factories to plug the gaps left by men recruited to the front lines. Management’s attempts to pay the women less than their male counterparts led to a strike. And this was a time of immense pressure from the cross-party government to keep calm and carry on.

So perhaps we should be grateful to the nats for their sense of history, in offering Glasgow’s first citizen a Roller instead of a Bentley. It’s just a shame that the council appears to be emulating the bosses of the 1944 dispute, and continues to withhold the money it owes to its own women workers.

The workers, employed through the council’s “arms-length” outfit Cordia, voted for strike action by a 98 per cent margin in a consultative ballot last month. “The challenge for the council is straightforward,” Rhea Wolfson, the fearless GMB organiser and Labour NEC member says. “Give back to our members the money that was stolen from them, recognise the value of their work and ensure Glasgow’s women will never be treated as second-class citizens ever again.”

At the SNP’s spring conference in Aberdeen today, delegates will debate a series of internal reforms designed to strengthen women’s voices in the party. But public-service heroes in Glasgow are still waiting for their nationalist council to pay up.

Labour MP Paul Sweeney suggested the new limo could be auctioned off, and contribute to settling the pay claims. Bolander says it will allow Glasgow to “show its best face to the world.”

But surely this would be better achieved by honouring Glasgow’s true Rolls-Royce heroes. Sell the damn motor, and pay up.