Winter of discontent

A week after getting trolled on twitter by numerous fans of Jeremy ‘Worzel Gummidge’ Corbyn, after having the sheer temerity to be critical of his disastrous leadership, if you can call it that, of the Labour Party I am going to add fuel to the flames by blogging about the rail workers and their endless dispute with Network Rail and the Rail companies. In my life, trains going on strike means little to me. I rarely travel by train because of the sheer cost of doing so. Those who do have little choice other than to do so because of work and the lack of available alternative or they are well-off enough to use the trains for leisure travel. There are two main trade unions covering railway workers. ASLEF which represents drivers and RMT which represents most of the rest. Both are engaged in strike action to get pay rises, which – and let us be crystal clear about this – is specifically aimed at disrupting the lives of ordinary folk. After God knows how many months, this is getting boring now and I have run out of patience and sympathy with them.

Now, should rail workers get a good pay rise? Of course they should. So too nurses and my old friends in the civil service who were awarded a 2% rise in July, with inflation now over 11%. And postal workers. But here’s the thing: who pays for this stuff. In relation to the railways, the industry is a basket case. It’s the government – the taxpayer, in other words – which keeps the trains going because they lose a fortune, even with insanely high fares. Without us, the railways would cease to be. The “who’s side are you on?” argument is very complex.

First of all, how much do railway workers earn. A train driver’s salary starts at £24,000 rising to a maximum of £65,000 for an experienced driver. In my long ‘career’ as a civil servant mostly on ‘the front line’ I just about reached the minimum figure by the time I left in 2014.  The median salary of other railway workers working full time is circa £38,000. These are not trifling figures. Which is where I have moved from my supportive position with rail workers.

RMT workers have been offered 8% over two years, accompanied by major changes to their terms and conditions and the effects of modernisation. Which means job cuts. Well, in an industry that is in a desperate financial position, what else does Network Rail do? Just hand over a huge pay rise and ramp up fares again, with many people who earn way less than, say, £38,000 paying for it? People argue that the railways should be nationalised, something I support, within reason, because I am not sure it is taxpayers’ money well spent to pay private companies billions of pounds to take the service back. Presumably, passengers could pay still higher fares to pay them off, too? In short, this sorry saga has no happy ending.

The RMT general secretary Mick Lynch is a hard left, anti-Labour, pro Brexit character, much loved by many on the hard left for his articulate dismantling of the arguments of politicians and media folk alike. I might have more sympathy for him and his union if he wasn’t taking action with the specific aim of buggering up the lives of people whose aims are to go to work or enjoy their leisure time. And calling major strike action before and after Christmas, messing up the lives of people I know and indeed am related to, means my reservoir of sympathy has completely run dry. I do not actively oppose Lynch and his members but I can’t support them either, certainly not when his fellow comrade Eddie Dempsey, who said “Tommy Robinson supporters are right in their hatred for the liberal left”, which is to say anyone of the left, other than the hard left. Which is me.

My advice to Lynch, which is worth the square root of fuck all, is that he should recognise reality here, accept that his members will not get a significant pay rise this year, or even next, and be realistic about the absolute fact that the railways are on their knees and need to be modernised. The only word that matters here is compromise because, let’s face it, no one is going to ‘win’. In fact, there exists the real possibility that everyone, and not just railway workers, is going to lose. And don’t rule out a Beeching style destruction of the rail network is this carries on into next year.

I am instinctively on the side of the workers and it pains me to say I can no longer support railway workers. Lynch’s flowery rhetoric clearly impresses a certain audience, but not I suspect those already paying through the nose to a shoddy, outdated railway system. I’ve seen his like before and things always end in tears. This time the tears will be those of his members and the public, whose lives he is really messing up. Sorry, I had to say it.