Maggie would know how to deal with these rail strikes
THE spectator magazine this week republished a column written by Margaret Thatcher’s biographer Charles Moore in 1982. Looking ahead to her prospects at the general election expected the following year, Moore noted with approval that the iron Lady had recently added the scalp of ray Buckton, leader of the train drivers’ union AsLEF, to that of Argentina’s General Galtieri.
Having just retaken the Falklands, Mrs Thatcher was steeling herself for her gruelling battles against the enemy within, which culminated with her crushing Arthur scargill’s year-long coal strike three years later.
reading Moore’s column, my life flashed before me. i can remember covering that summer’s rail strike, as a young industrial correspondent. Trawling the archives to refresh my memory, the first cutting i stumbled across was a front-page story i wrote for London’s Evening standard.
AsLEF had called a national strike, aimed at bringing the railways to a complete standstill, over plans to modernise working practices.
British rail, backed by the government, wanted to scrap the traditional eight-hour day, set in stone since 1919, and introduce shifts tailored to modern timetables.
Known as flexible rostering, it would mean a small adjustment allowing drivers to work between seven and nine hours a day.
No big deal, you might think. But Buckton and AsLEF went ballistic, insisting that this modest change would compromise passenger safety, the stock excuse of rail union leaders to this day. Buckton’s intransigence infuriated sid Weighell, leader of the biggest railway union, the Nur (later to become the rMT), who had accepted the changes in exchange for a pay rise.
My report featured sid slamming AsLEF as a ‘raging mob’. He said it was farcical to insist on a rigid eight-hour day just because their grandfathers had worked it.
WEiGHELLattacked AsLEF’s ‘misguided, stupid, inconsiderate’ behaviour, but he agreed that his members should not cross official picket lines in accordance with the unions’ sacred code of solidarity.
That notion of working-class solidarity was crumbling, however. Plenty of AsLEF drivers broke the strike and reported for duty, worried about their ability to pay the bills. Nur members defied instructions not to cross picket lines and British rail was able to run some near-normal services.
Public sympathy was minimal, since the action stopped people getting to work. Among London’s more libidinous commuters, however, flexible rostering was dubbed ‘flexible rogering’, as it gave them the perfect excuse to stay in town and conduct illicit office affairs.
Only Labour, led by Worzel Gummidge lookalike Michael Foot, gave unqualified backing to the strike. Left-wing toff Tony Benn, just a year after failing by a whisker to become the party’s deputy leader, headed a delegation of MPs on the picket line at London’s King’s Cross station.
The strike eventually collapsed after 11 days when British rail, with Thatcher’s encouragement, threatened to close the network indefinitely and sack anyone refusing to return to work.
Fast forward 40 years and here we are again. The railways are in chaos because of a wave of strikes. Labour MPs are back on the picket lines. This time, however, there is no rift between the two main rail unions. Both the rMT and AsLEF are determined to cause havoc.
sid Weighell, an old- school pragmatist who journeyed from industrial firebrand to economic realist, has long since been succeeded by a new breed of union militants — from the late socialist streetfighter Bob Crow to today’s rMT leader Mick Lynch, darling of the BBC and the Guardianistas.
The rMT’s headquarters near London’s Euston station should be twinned with the Kremlin.
Listening to Lynch’s ridiculous rhetoric, along with hardline AsLEF general secretary Mick Whelan, it sounds as if these strikes are aimed as much at attempting to bring down the Government as securing pay rises for their members.
Despite Covid lockdowns, rail workers continued to receive their full wages, thanks to £16 billion in grants from the Government.
No one was furloughed on reduced pay, even if they were sent home because of the huge reduction in services.
Now, though, they are demanding double-digit increases to stay ahead of rising inflation.
To hear rail union leaders rant, you’d think their members were on starvation wages. Yet the median salary for all rail staff is £44,000 a year. Train drivers earn just shy of £60,000 for a 35 to 40-hour week and can get even more with overtime — thanks, ironically, to the very same flexible rostering that AsLEF opposed. sorry, but having spent years covering the unions, i’ve heard it all before.
These rail strikes are more politically than industrially motivated, just as scargill’s miners’ strike was aimed at staging a putsch against Thatcher’s government rather than saving uneconomic pits.
Lynch and Whelan are loving it. The rMT leader is now salivating at the prospect of a general strike if the Tories bring forward plans, set out in the 2019 manifesto, to insist on a minimum level of essential services during industrial disputes.
Lynch is threatening the biggest industrial walk-out since 1926. Oh, for heaven’s sake.
Listening to his fevered language, you’d think the Tories were sending children up chimneys and the Jarrow Marchers were stuffing newspapers into the peeling soles of their hobnail boots.
Bring on the Hovis theme! We’re not living in the 1920s, or even the 1980s any more. The world has moved on. We’ve had two years of pandemic-induced stasis. As a result of Dishi rishi’s lavish furlough scheme, which saved millions of jobs, the country is £400 billion in debt.
People everywhere are having to tighten their belts, although plenty of those who have been fortunate enough to be attached to the taxpayers’ teat have never had it so good.
Asi wrote here last week, public and quasi-public sector workers — such as the railways and the postal industry — have been largely spared the sacrifices demanded of private sector staff and the self-employed.
rail workers, in particular, should be counting their blessings — not holding the country to ransom — after having their full salaries subsidised throughout Covid.
Yes, the cost of living is going up, mostly to do with outside forces such as the price of energy and basic foodstuffs following Putin’s invasion of ukraine.
Perhaps Kremlin sympathisers within the rMT executive would like to take it up with Putin the next time one of them picks up a Kalashnikov and pulls on a fur hat in solidarity with russia. The rail unions might also reflect on the fact that bringing the railways to a halt isn’t the weapon it once was.
Working from home has practically killed the daily commute, even if WFH has put the kibosh on flexible rogering.
These days they can’t even count on the support of the Labour Party. Keir starmer may not have the courage to stand up to the unions, but at least he had the bottle to sack his deputy’s boyfriend for joining the picket line. And Ange rayner is no Tony Benn, either.
ultimately, those who suffer most will be the unions’ own members, who stand to lose thousands of pounds in wages. it’s time for the Government to concentrate their minds and dust off those 40-year-old plans to shut the network indefinitely and sack anyone who refuses to work normally.
Liz Truss is making the right noises, promising not only to ensure minimum essential services, but also raising the threshold required in a ballot for the approval of strike action, so that a militant minority can no longer impose their will on the majority.
if Thatch-wannabe Fizzy Lizzie becomes Prime Minister, as now looks likely, and is as good as her word in facing down these wreckers, we may start to believe her as she seeks to emulate her great heroine.
You never know, Charles Moore might even write a column, if not a book, about her.
all over her — if you are both feeling a bit frisky, you go out for a drink and then one thing leads to another.
‘It’s the easiest thing in the world to happen if you are a red-blooded young male.
‘Gill and I were sensible and decided it wasn’t going to happen to us.’
He took a common- sense attitude to acting as well, treating it as a working man’s trade. When work was offered, he turned up on time and did it well.
after a series of films, beginning in 1959 opposite Tommy Steele in Tommy The Toreador, he landed perhaps his bestloved role in 1970, as stationmaster albert Perks in The Railway Children.
By then he had his own ITV comedy show, Cribbins, costarring madeline Smith and Sheila Steafel, which ran for two seasons.
HEWaS a regular on Comedy Playhouse, the series of one-off playlets by the BBC’s top writers alan Simpson and Ray Galton, and on the music hall series The Good Old Days.
He was also a regular on variety shows hosted by Harry Secombe, Val Doonican, Roy Castle — and a guest seven times on This Is Your life (with an eighth appearance as the star).
Bernard was such an everpresent face on telly that, when the BBC first recorded a pilot episode of Blankety Blank, it was inevitable he would be one of the panel.
But he was also highly regarded on stage, starring in two West End farces — not now, Darling and Run For Your Wife.
In 1985, he took over from Bob Hoskins as nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls at the national Theatre.
Ten years later, he was back at the national, as the charismatic conjuror Professor Otto marvuglia in la Grande magia by Eduardo De Filippo — a fine retort to anyone who supposed he could play only broad comedy. He liked to recall a compliment from Barbara Windsor, when they were filming Carry On Spying in 1964.
‘We didn’t get into this business to become famous, did we, Bernie? We did it because we like fooling around and showing off a bit.
‘You just do your job and then go fishing, don’t you? That’s the way to do it, Bernie.’
That’s his epitaph. Bernard Cribbins, born 1928 — gone fishing, 2022.