Recent visitors to London’s Trafalgar Square may have wondered whether they had overdone the previous evening’s entertainment as they watched a large pink elephant wandering through the streets of London.

For most at least, it was not just an alcohol-fuelled hallucination, but the mascot of a campaign by the Communication Workers Union (CWU), against what it sees as the erosion of its members’ jobs by the growth of offshore call centres by British Telecom and a growing number of other British companies.