Militant strikers crippling UK snubbed pay rise offer
Ministers draw up plans to prevent blackouts and beat food shortages
UNION barons were accused of a ‘strike first, negotiate second’ approach yesterday after ordering crippling walkouts despite being offered a pay increase for their members.
Network Rail negotiators offered the hard-Left RMT a pay rise of at least 2 per cent, it can be revealed.
The offer is not far off the 3 per cent pay rise ministers last year gave to NHS staff who were on the front line of the battle against Covid.
Negotiators said RMT workers could get an even bigger increase if the union agreed to start discussions on modernising work practices.
But rather than continue talks, on Tuesday the union’s bosses ordered tens of thousands of members to strike on June 21, 23 and 25.
Ministers and Network Rail are putting contingency plans in place which would see freight trains prioritised over passenger services to prevent blackouts in some areas and ensure supermarket shelves and petrol forecourts remain stocked.
Multiple-day strikes could lead to lights going out in places due to freight services to power stations being hit, ministers have been told.
To make matters worse, the Unite union yesterday said its 1,000 members will join RMT workers by striking on the London Underground on June 21.
Labour was in chaos over the strikes yesterday after refusing to condemn RMT union barons for a second day.
A spokesman for party leader Sir Keir Starmer even accused the Government of needing to ‘play a more active role’, despite RMT bosses calling for strikes before talks have properly begun.
Asked if Sir Keir condemned the strikes, the spokesman said: ‘We’ve been clear in the position that the strikes shouldn’t go ahead.
‘There is still time for there to be a resolution... people have the right to withdraw their labour in line with the law, but the situation as a point of principle is we do not want to see unnecessary disruption for the country.’
But responding to Labour MP Afzal Khan about passport backlogs during Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday, Boris Johnson asked: ‘When it comes to travel chaos, have we heard any condemnation yet from the opposition of the RMT and their reckless strike?’
The walkouts, the biggest since 1989, threaten to cause chaos for millions, and would affect key events such as the Glastonbury music festival, Armed Forces Day and UK athletics championships.
Hospitality industry leaders last night said strikes would have a ‘devastating impact’ on businesses as they recover from the pandemic.
A government source said: ‘[The RMT] seem to be relishing the prospect of chaos with this strike first, negotiate second approach, which is putting a gun to the head of the industry.’
Health Secretary Sajid Javid told the RMT to ‘act like grown-ups’. He said: ‘It would be wrong at every level to have this strike.’
RMT boss Mick Lynch yesterday denied his union was ‘jumping the gun’ by calling the strikes. He said: ‘Talks began two
‘Relishing the prospect of chaos’
years ago at the start of Covid. They [Network Rail] are intent on cutting thousands of jobs in the railway. We think that threatens safety because they’re cutting safety regimes to do that, they’re threatening our members’ positions, and they won’t give us a pay rise.
‘Most of our members have not had a pay deal for two to three years and we need to resolve those issues now.’
Talks only began in earnest with Network Rail, which is in charge of infrastructure, in recent months after it declined to give a guarantee of no compulsory redundancies for this year.
Of the offer made by Network Rail negotiators, an RMT spokesman said: ‘These claims are extremely misleading and do nothing to help bring a resolution to this dispute.
BRITAIN’S railways are a public service. They exist to make life easier for the passengers who use them. But that is an alien concept to the trade union leaders who want to hold the network hostage. For them, this taxpayersupported industry exists only to provide cash, job security and pensions for their members. To hell, they think, with people trying to get to work, to a hospital appointment, a job interview or to visit relatives.
As railways minister under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, I worked closely with the rail unions. It was my job to negotiate hard with them as well as with rail bosses to secure the best deal for passengers.
Yet that era of relative industrial peace and co-operation has long come to an end.
In recent months, a festering combination of unrealistic pay demands and a chronic publicfunding squeeze have created a perfect storm — and now we are all about to pay the price.
The strikes announced by union barons this week are the worst since the network was privatised in 1989. They threaten to bring railways to a standstill when they are inflicted on June 21, 23 and 25.
Damage
Cynically calculated to cause the maximum damage by taking place on those alternating days, the strikes will effectively mean that the rail network is off-limits for a week, once staff shift patterns are factored in.
Chillingly, more strikes are promised by the union barons if their demands are not met.
The echoes of the 1970s, when Britain was ground to a halt by militant union bosses, are all too clear.
Indeed, one railway union leader is now promising a Summer of Discontent — an echo of the Winter of Discontent of 1978-79, with its picket lines, blockaded factories, rubbish piling up in the streets and corpses left unburied.
For its part, the Labour Party has utterly failed to condemn this industrial militancy.
Let me be clear — and I speak as a former Labour minister. The party needs to understand that it’s either on the side of the passengers or the unions. Those who sit on the fence have taken a side — the wrong side. Labour is supposed to be the party of working people.
In practice, that does not mean defending intransigent and bullying unions inflicting carnage on railway passengers. It means defending working people’s right to get to work.
And it’s not as if these unions all speak for Labour anyway. The most hardline, the RMT, was kicked out of the party as far back as 2004, after it was found to be in breach of Labour’s rules by having affiliated to a rival far-Left party.
The RMT showed no loyalty to Labour: why on earth should Labour show any loyalty to it?
At its core, this is an oldfashioned dispute about pay and conditions. The RMT wants the Government to guarantee that there will be no compulsory redundancies — even though the industry has to plug a £2 billion funding gap and after taxpayers forked out a huge £16billion during lockdown to keep the railways operating without passengers. (Those passenger numbers, by the way, still haven’t returned to pre-pandemic levels.)
Separately, the RMT union is demanding an astronomical pay rise for its members of 11.1 per cent.
No matter that rail workers are already paid more than public sector workers — an average of £44,000 a year compared with £37,000 for teachers and £31,000 for nurses. And that’s before you count their gold-plated pensions.
These strikes were announced before serious negotiations with the employers had even begun. And that betrays the real motivation of the union leaders: to create political problems for the Government by causing chaos on the rail network, rather than look after their members’ interests.
It is, quite frankly, a scandal and, once again, the victims will be ordinary passengers.
Of course, the union leaders themselves don’t have to worry about the cost of living. Manuel Cortes, chief of the whitecollar TSSA, took home more than £120,000 in 2020, including over £18,000 in pension contributions. The RMT’s former boss, the appropriately named Mick Cash, trousered more than £160,000 in 2020, including almost £40,000 in pension contributions.
These hefty salaries don’t prevent their recipients from holding extreme Left-wing views, however. RMT president Alex Gordon is a lifelong Marxist and senior member of Britain’s Communist Party.
Another senior RMT official, Steve Hedley, was suspended by his union after saying he would ‘throw a party’ if Boris Johnson died from coronavirus. He was later reinstated.
As the Mail has previously shown, several of his RMT comrades appear to have shown worrying pro-Russian sympathies, though it must be said that the union has recently — and belatedly — insisted it does not support Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.
Scrutiny
So what can we actually do to stop these strikes from happening in future?
Renationalisation is not the answer. The state can never match the investment, budgetplanning and good management practices offered by the private sector.
Yes, the unions — like many on the Left — would prefer to see our railways back in the public ownership, but not because this would make the network more efficient. On the contrary, Government ministers, under huge public pressure and scrutiny, are far easier negotiating opponents than the hard-nosed managers of the private sector.
Want proof? Look no further than my native Scotland, where Nicola Sturgeon’s administration nationalised the ScotRail provider in April this year. This was meant to herald a new age of transport in the SNP’s Caledonian utopia. But the results, so far, have been entirely as I and so many others predicted. Within days, the unions announced an all-out strike in support of their latest pay claim.
Instead, I have another modest proposal. For a year, I was a member of the advisory panel on a major Government review of the railways headed by Keith Williams, the executive chairman of Royal Mail.
During the review, I urged civil servants to include a commitment to so-called Minimum Service Level Agreements (MSLAs). In other words, I want to see the railways recognised as the essential public service they are: used by police officers, health workers and others vital to saving lives.
If these people are prevented from going to work, the consequences are devastating.
New legislation would oblige the unions to provide at least a skeleton staff on strike days, so a minimum service would still operate during disputes.
Fruitless
This wouldn’t mean that the right to strike would be curtailed but that passengers’ needs would be put before trade unions’ right to make people’s lives a misery.
These reforms were promised in the Conservative Party’s manifesto at the last general election — won, you’ll remember, by a thumping majority.
So they enjoy a democratic mandate — and yesterday, transport committee chairman Huw Merriman called for the law to be passed and the Prime Minister’s official spokesman said the Government remained ‘committed’ to it.
Ministers could have passed this legislation already, but they hoped the unions might adopt a more responsible approach that would render doing so unnecessary.
Such optimism has proved fruitless. The unions’ selfinterested eagerness to embark on ruinous strikes has exposed them for what they are — and taught ministers that being reasonable and patient doesn’t work with these people.
Taxpayers and passengers are already paying through the nose to sustain the railways. Why should they be forced to pay even more in terms of misery and inconvenience?
The unions have shown their true face. Now it’s time for the Government to take a stand — or we really will all be heading back to the 1970s.
Tom Harris was parliamentary under secretary of state for transport from 2006 to 2008.