Union baron on £177k forcing us back to the 70s
Once hailed as a moderate, Mick Cash now follows in the footsteps of Marxist Bob Crow
BACK in 2002, a highranking union official made a public statement that alarmed and dismayed many of his colleagues. Mick Cash said he was ‘fed up’ with the RMT being portrayed as ‘strike-happy and extreme’.
Perhaps it was relatively easy for him to be portrayed as a moderate when his boss was Bob Crow, the firebrand RMT chief who had a bust of Karl Marx on his desk.
But fellow union bosses, many of whom shared Mr Crow’s hard-line Communist beliefs, wanted Mr Cash to take a far stronger approach.
Fast forward 14 years and Mr Cash – who became RMT general secretary after Mr Crow’s sudden death from a heart attack in 2014 – appears to have changed his philosophy, no doubt to appease some of the more militant ‘brothers’.
Mr Cash is now the orchestrator of industrial action that has caused chaos for rail passengers in Scotland and indeed across the UK. RMT is also behind plans for five days of industrial action in a dispute with Southern Rail.
The union is balloting members on strike action in a row with Britain’s largest rail franchise, Govia Thameslink, over planned cuts to ticket offices. Another dispute is simmering with Virgin East Coast as the union opens a strike ballot over an alleged threat to jobs, working conditions and safety.
All of which is in stark contrast to Mr Cash’s more conciliatory strategy in 2002, when he said: ‘I want to help take the union into the 21st century.’
At the time he also attacked the Left of the RMT, saying: ‘We have had more strike ballots than we have had annual pay awards.’
Yet when he took over from hard Leftwinger Mr Crow, Mr Cash insisted there would be ‘no deviation from the industrial, political and organising strategy mapped out by RMT under Bob’s leadership’ – and he has been true to his word. Far from taking the union into the 21st century, he has sent it hurtling back to the 1970s.
GIVEn his long association with Labour, which he joined in 1982, it was thought Mr Cash, a vocal supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, might want to repair the rift that made the RMT the first union ever expelled from the party, in 2004.
On the contrary, he has said previously that he is thinking about giving up on Labour altogether and starting afresh.
Ahead of last year’s General Election, he said ‘if one or two large trade unions start to say we need an alternative, they have the organisation and the financial clout to start developing a political party that could have its roots back in the working class’.
But the union’s official accounts show how far Mr Cash has drifted from the ‘working class’. The former Labour councillor, who lives in a £400,000 home in Watford, Hertfordshire, received remuneration of £128,437 in 2014, the most recent accounts publicly availa-
ble, while claiming £48,316 in ‘allowances and expenses’.
The union insists the figures relate to the year when Mr Cash was made RMT general secretary and the figure conflates pension contributions of £27,366 and the employer’s National Insurance contributions, with Mr Cash’s current basic salary of £74,063. Still, it is a handsome reward for the married father of two who has spent all of his adult life in the railways, working as an engineer before becoming a union official.
Self-effacing Mr Cash became a skilled negotiator, not as bombastic as Mr Crow, developing a reputation as a pragmatist who worked behind the scenes to avert strike action. Those days must seem very far away for the 56-year-old as he plots his next strike from the North London HQ of the RMT.
Its bosses meet in a conference room opposite Mr Cash’s office, sitting around a table where, more than a century ago, union leaders made the decision to found the Labour Party. In 1926, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) gathered around the same table as they planned the General Strike.
However, the RMT is replete not only with history but also with hypocrisy.
Mr Cash’s predecessor, self-styled communist-socialist Mr Crow, was repeatedly criticised for having a North-East London council house while raking in a colossal salary. Months before his fatal heart attack, aged only 52, he and his wife Nicola sunned themselves in Rio de Janeiro as they took a lavish cruise – days before a London Underground strike caused chaos.
Mr Crow later scoffed: ‘I don’t give two hoots. Would it be better if I went on holiday in a caravan to make myself look working-class? I won’t apologise for it.’
While Mr Cash, who was Mr Crow’s deputy for 12 years, has adopted a lower profile – until the recent strike action – some of his colleagues have no reservations about making their views known.
Steve Hedley, senior assistant general secretary of the RMT, said earlier this year in a radio interview: ‘All the Tories are a disgrace, they should be taken out and shot, to be frank with you.’
MR HEdLEy, from East London, is one of the union movement’s most controversial characters and has caused offence with some of his Facebook posts.
One, which emerged during his failed attempt to succeed Mr Crow as RMT chief, showed him in a Soviet-style military hat with an assault rifle in his hand.
He has posted status updates on his Facebook page during Tube strikes revelling in the chaos they caused, including: ‘It’s taken me three hours to drive eight miles: mission accomplished, gridlock achieved, victory to the RMT.’
For many, the hypocrisy of the RMT leadership is too much to bear.
Scottish Tory transport spokesman Alex Johnstone said: ‘This is a very typical story when it comes to champagne socialists. Too often, they’re wealthy individuals who’re happy to watch others struggle to further their own ends.’
defending Mr Cash’s remuneration, an RMT spokesman said: ‘The rate of pay of the general secretary is set by the members through our democratic structures. The salary is published, is in the public domain and the process of deciding the rate for the job is transparent and democratic.
‘It is right that the senior official of the union receives decent pay and conditions and the idea that that compromises his ability to argue for a fair deal for our members in the range of industries we operate across is ludicrous.’
Mr Cash is also bullishly unrepentant, once saying of his media critics: ‘They’ll villainise [sic] anybody, if it suits them, because they’ve got their own agenda.’
After Mr Cash became RMT general secretary in 2014, some within government and indeed bosses of rail firms were falsely reassured by his credentials as a moderate – at least by the RMT’s standards.
One leading Tory with experience of industrial disputes affecting transport in London, who did not want to be named, said: ‘Although Bob Crow fought very hard for his members, he was also an asset to us because he was a threatening figure. We could tell people to stick with us or this is what you get.
‘Cash will say and do the same things but he will sound much more reasonable, which could make him more dangerous.’
Against the background of the strike turmoil Mr Cash is now unleashing, weary rail passengers will reflect that this was an all too prescient warning.