UK’s escalating ‘strikes risk killing off struggling businesses’

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The New Year has brought no thaw in the freezing, embittered industrial relations on the rail network.

This week the RMT, led by militant motormouth Mick Lynch, is to stage four days of walkouts, while on Thursday – the one day that the union has not called out its members – the train divers of ASLEF are to mount their own strike.

The impact of these stoppages will be bigger than anything seen in the rail dispute so far. It is estimated that 80,000 trains will be cancelled, 16 million passenger journeys will be hit and 80 per cent of services will be cancelled.

This unfolding tale of turmoil might depress the travelling public, but it is relished by Lynch whose whole approach is based on confrontation.

Fomenting discord is a central part of his job description. The picket line is his spiritual home. He indulges in empty rhetoric about “getting round the table” for negotiations, but in reality he is a bully who thrives on threats of unrest.

For him the 1970s were the golden age of trade unions, when they frequently held the country to ransom and dictated economic policy to a supine Labour government.

Yet behind all his swagger and bluster, Lynch is beginning to recognise that he is not nearly as powerful as he pretends.

The truth is that he has been put on the defensive because there are signs that the strikes are beginning to fail, as support from the public dwindles and his members grow exasperated by the costs of the walkouts.

One estimate holds that the strikers have so far lost around £5000 from their pay packets in the current dispute, money which will not be recovered even if the train companies surrendered to the RMT’s extravagant demands.

Moreover, despite the miserable disruption on the railways, the strikes have not had the wider economic impact he hoped.

Last year, he said that national stoppage would “bring the country to a standstill” but it has not happened, partly because the nature of the economy has changed since Covid, with millions now able to work from home.

That explains why Lynch, who was previously renowned for his bullish articulacy, has been sounding so rattled in recent media interviews, like one conducted before Christmas on Good Morning Britain by this paper’s brilliant columnist Richard Madeley.

Under superb, persistent questioning by Richard, Lynch began to bleat pathetically about interruptions and the station doing the Government’s work.

He was at it again on BBC radio yesterday morning as he wailed that the Express has given “the Government their policies” in preventing a deal.

That kind of nonsense just reveals again how Lynch lives in a paranoid, totalitarian bubble filled with Marxist notions about the class struggle and the Tory-led capitalist machine.

He has no understanding of how newspapers operate, no appreciation of free speech or liberty of the press. Marinated in left-wing ideology, he can only think in terms of spin and propaganda. What he cannot handle is a direct challenge to his socialist narrative of grievance, where his members are portrayed as the downtrodden members of the proletariat.

But the facts contradict this invented story of woe, as this paper has frequently pointed out. We are not acting as an agent of the Government when we argue that the rail strike is completely unjustified. With a median salary of £59,000 for drivers and £44,000 for other employees, the rail staff are far better paid than most other British workers.

Moreover, they have been offered a generous pay settlement of 8 per cent spread over 2 years. Nor is there the slightest truth in Lynch’s claim that the railways are “underfunded.” Just the opposite is true.

This year alone £16billion of taxpayers’ money is being poured into the creaking system.

Just as deceitful is Lynch’s assertion that the RMT is not opposed to modernisation or reform. In fact, one of the prime reasons that the railways are in such an expensive mess is because of the union’s determination to uphold outdated, restrictive practices.

Lynch likes to pose as a warrior for justice, but the great irony of his dispute is that the working-class employees, who rely on public transport, who are suffering the most. As Len Shackleton, the Professor of Economics at Buckingham University, puts it, the RMT “is really hitting relatively poorer workers rather than the stay-at-home middle class people”.

For the sake of our whole nation, this divisive, destructive strike cannot be allowed to succeed. The operating companies and the government must stand firm against the Lynch mob.