We cannot give way to rail strike blackmail – this is a defining moment for Britain
LABOUR deputy leader Angela Rayner was lucky this week.
Just as she was being quizzed on the BBC about the impending national rail strike, she pleaded that, sorry, she had a train to catch. End of interview.
I hope she made it to wherever she was going. Shame though, because we missed Angela’s full take on the most serious industrial action on the rail network for decades.
Including how she differs from her leader, Sir Keir Starmer, who appears to be against this disruptive and unnecessary stoppage.
A week on Tuesday the nation’s trains will mostly – unless sanity prevails – grind to a halt.
Not for one day but for the best part of a week.
And more strikes could follow through the summer if the hard-Left cabal now steering the RMT union do not get their way.
The RMT has chosen to walk out on June 21, 23 and 25. But the backlog of disruption will bleed into the days after too.
Maximum pain for the public with the minimum possible hit to rail workers’ pay packets – seven days of totally avoidable disruption for the price of three!
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That is the cynical calculation of the RMT leadership. Well, we’ll see about that.
In the past, rail workers have been able to top up wage packets reduced by striking through overtime working on subsequent days. That won’t be happening this time.
Rail managers and ministers are determined to ensure strikers cannot milk the system to maintain their income while inflicting misery on the public.
And where is Labour in all this? Well, take your pick.
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While Sir Keir is trying to keep his head down, his shadow front bench have other ideas.
Take Wes Streeting – he says if he were an RMT member he would vote to strike. Lisa Nandy, meanwhile, “stands with the rail workers”.
And former Corbyn deputy John McDonnell is just straining at the leash for some 1970s-style industrial action. “I’ll be on the picket line,” he promises.
Scratch the surface of Starmer’s supposedly modernised Labour Party and you find unreconstructed Corbynism.
No wonder, because Labour is still drenched in rail union money. The three main rail unions, RMT, Aslef and TSSA, have donated £1million to Labour over the past five years, including donations to individual MPs.
But the blind loyalty of some Labour politicians to the union cause cannot obscure the all-too-visible truths about this dispute.
The railways are still haemorrhaging money after two years of the pandemic, during which they consumed £16billion of taxpayers’ money to survive.
That’s £600 for every household in the land – money which saved the industry from wholesale redundancies.
With £96billion being invested by this gov-ernment in rail infra-structure, rail has a potentially bright future. But we must rid it of outdated working practices.
Only 12 per cent of rail tickets are bought in ticket offices but the RMT won’t hear of any being closed.
The train operators and Network Rail, which runs the track, want to negotiate in good faith on pay, and there is a sensible pay rise to be had.
But of course, we can’t match the current level of inflation because that will fuel an inflationary wage spiral across the economy – just as in the dark days of the 1970s.
But rather than negotiate in good faith, the RMT executive has decided to hold a gun to the industry’s head, declaring strikes before talks have even begun in earnest.
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We cannot give way to blackmail. This is a defining moment for our economy. Do we modernise ourselves and move forward to increased productivity and prosperity?
Or return to an era we thought long gone – that of rapacious union barons, stagnating industry and double-digit inflation?
We all know the answer.
