When you start accusing the Radio 4 presenter Mishal Husain of being a Right-wing stooge, you really need to question your own grip on reality. Yet that is exactly what the RMT general secretary Mick Lynch did on the Today progamme this morning.
After he was allowed at some length to blurt out how unreasonable he considered it that his members should have to accept changes in working practices in return for a fat pay rise, Husain asked the RMT general secretary an innocuous question about how much money his members had sacrificed as a result of this year’s strikes.
It sent Lynch into an extraordinary rage. He refused to answer the question and furiously told Husain that it was about time she showed some ‘partiality towards working-class people’.
Never mind that, as Lynch well knows, BBC presenters are obliged under the terms of the corporation’s charter to be impartial — something which they do not always manage. He expected Husain brazenly to do his bidding for him.
Mick Lynch has had testy interviews with broadcasters while discussing the RMT strikes this week
Yet Husain’s question was poignant and to the point. To judge by the result of the RMT’s latest ballot, in which 64 per cent of members backed strike action, down from 89 per cent in the ballot which started the latest round of strike in May, support for Lynch among rail workers is starting to wane.
That is little wonder when you realise how much the strike has cost them: the answer to Husain’s question is that workers have lost around £4,000 each as a result of this year’s action.
Perhaps the fall in support among members is beginning to get to Lynch. In another undignified fit of intemperance on ITV’s Good Morning Britain, he told presenter Richard Madeley as the pair were speaking over each other: ‘Why don’t you just interview yourself?
It is odd to think that just a few months ago Lynch was being hailed as an unflappable and eloquent voice of reason, someone who was supposed to elucidate the feeling of the working population everywhere.
Today, with his crumbling popularity, he is more like a flailing Arthur Scargill during the 1984/85 miners’ strike which ended in disaster for union members.
Lynch told presenter Richard Madeley as the pair were speaking over each other: ‘Why don’t you just interview yourself?
Could it be that an increasing number of train workers are beginning to understand the truth: that he could well destroy their industry and their jobs with it.
There are far tougher questions which Husain and Madeley could have put to Lynch. They could, for example, have asked him why he thought rail workers were being paid boom-time salaries when their industry is becoming ever more reliant on taxpayer handouts.
The median salary for a rail worker, according to the Office of National Statistics, is £43,747 — more than £10,000 above the median salary of the UK working population as a whole.
Yet the industry cannot possibly afford these high levels of remuneration. In the year to March, the railways received a staggering £13.3 billion in subsidies (equivalent to £400 for every household in the country) — compared with only £5.8 billion in ticket revenue.
Passenger numbers, meanwhile, have never recovered from the pandemic. Between April and June, the number of journeys was only 76 per cent of what it was in the same period in 2019. Worse, with more people working from home, it is revenue from lucrative peak time journeys which has been hit the most.
Any union leader who was grounded in reality would recognise the dire straits the industry was in and be prepared to co-operate with employers to preserve as many jobs as possible, accepting that working practices have to change.
Yet Lynch continues to refuse even to discuss the introduction of Driver Only Operation (DOO) on more routes, trying to make out in his Today interview that rail companies were foolish even to suggest this to the union.
As ever, he trotted out the same old discredited argument that DOO compromises safety. We have had driver-only trains since they were introduced on the Bedford to St Pancras route in 1982. They now account for 30 per cent of all trains in Britain, and are standard practice on the Underground, as well as being used widely in other countries.
The Rail Safety And Standards Board has examined the data and concluded there is no discernible difference in safety between trains with and trains without guards.
The simple fact is that the longer the rail strikes go on, the more people will start questioning why they are paying so much to support a mollycoddled group of workers.
It won’t just be frustrated passengers asking this, but taxpayers who don’t use the railways and yet are forced to pay hundreds of pounds a year to them regardless. Even before the pandemic, a YouGov poll found that 39 per cent of the population had not set foot on a train in the past 12 months.
True, the rail companies themselves are living off taxpayers, too — it is outrageous the way they have been allowed to continue to cream off fat profits when passenger numbers have collapsed. But that shouldn’t make anyone more inclined to support Lynch and his union: rail companies and unions alike are ripping off the country.
Lynch should remember how the miners’ strike turned out. ‘We’re going back to work with our heads held high,’ Arthur Scargill said after throwing in the towel after nearly a year. No they weren’t. Many of his members, impoverished through lost pay, had gone back to work already.
The coal industry was doomed anyway but the strike certainly hastened its end and led to people losing their jobs who could have worked out their careers.
Lynch needs a sharp reality check if he wants to avoid the same happening to his own members.
