End of the line?

I’m afraid I have long tired of the strikes on the railways. While I have admired RMT boss Mick Lynch’s gift of the gab, as he ties political interviewers up in knots, I still can’t look at him without prefacing his name with ‘Hard Tory Brexiter’. Lynch is well to the left of the Labour Party and campaigned to leave the EU solely because he felt continued membership of the EU would prevent the re-nationalisation of the railways. That Brexit would come with a bonfire of workers’ rights was of little concern to Lynch. One of Lynch’s deputies, the charmless Eddie Dempsey, isn’t the sort of many I’d like to do business with, given his empathy with the supporters of fascist rabble-rouser Tommy Robinson who he said were right to hate “liberals”. Nice. Dempsey, by the way, encouraged his fellow comrades to infiltrate the Labour Party back in 2015 to support Jeremy Corbyn, essentially for a laugh, also describing Corbyn ally John McDonnell of being “a snake”. Imagine how he talks about his enemies?

Anyway, I’ve topped tooting my car horn as a mark of support to the RMT and ASLEF members who regularly picket my local railway station when they’re on strike, which these days seems to be most of the time. I’m basically sick of it.

It’s hard to get to the truth of what railway workers actually earn since amounts vary but the BBC has calculated their median wage is around £38,000 per annum. But for train drivers, the average train drivers earns £48,000 per year, rising to £65,000. I appreciate that not all railway workers earn these sizeable amounts but that’s a decent wage. Not undeserved, I’ll concede, but it’s hardly the stuff of food banks, is it?

Hardly anyone uses the railways these days. Something like 85% of journeys are not by train. I know few people who use them. Most are used by commuters and leisure travellers. If you do not need to use the train, you won’t. If you live in Bristol and go to a gig in, say London, the last form of transport you would choose would be the train, unless you were loaded.

Railways are massively subsidised by a taxpayer that barely uses them. That’s the madness of where we are. And since Covid, substantially fewer people are using trains at all. During the height of Covid, I’d watch empty trains whizzing through our village. Now, on my train-spotting days, I watch empty trains whizzing through our village. Maybe we should simply dig up the tracks and introduce thousands of miles of bus lanes? I don’t really mean that, but is someone going to take a serious look at how our railways can become relevant in the modern age?

I’m particularly pissed off because my plans for a March 2023 writing expedition to the Netherlands has fizzled out due to the uncertainty. I intended to retrace the steps and route of my childhood by going from Bristol to Rotterdam by train, train, boat and then train and, where possible, recreating the past. The uncertainty means I can’t do that and I have had to postpone it until the autumn. A minor, hardly life-threatening inconvenience, for sure but for me it’s more than irritating. I can imagine there are thousands, probably tens, maybe even hundreds of thousands, of folk who are now unable to plan and won’t use the railways for the foreseeable future. Some, I suspect, will never use them again.

Mick Lynch has argued his case well, that his members need a substantial pay rise and that their conditions should not be changed or modified. He says he would compromise if necessary, but never says how, at least not in public. Surely that time has come and it’s all incumbent upon the train operators and the government to at least meet the unions somewhere, if not in the middle, that would be acceptable or maybe less unacceptable.

One thing is for sure: no one is going to “win” this dispute but it’s quite likely everyone could lose it. We already have an unloved and overpriced rail network which the vast majority of people never use. Sooner or later the ones who are footing much of the bill for keeping it going – us, the taxpayer – are going to ask a simple question: “Is it worth it?”