How Lynch the Grinch is forcing us into lockdown for Christmas
ON SATURDAY I shall be defrosting my windscreen and heading up the M1 for an eight-hour round trip to collect my daughter and her boyfriend from Manchester, where they would otherwise be stranded. Already she’s messaged twice to ask me if I can squeeze in two more. Thanks to Mick ‘the Grinch’ Lynch and his co-ordinated strike action, there isn’t a single seat on any bus, train or plane heading south. The second the strikes were announced, they all sold out.
Well, not quite. Some places are still available, but not if you’re on a student budget.
I don’t mind spending my day off being Mum taxi – it’s what I do – but as ever with these things, it’s not the wealthy elite, so despised by the Left and their union paymasters (£15million so far contributed to Keir Starmer since he became leader, lest we forget who really runs the Labour Party) who will suffer.
These strikes won’t affect them: they have private health insurance and rarely use public transport or fly commercial anyway. If they fall ill or need to get somewhere, they can just throw money at the problem. It might be irritating, but it won’t be crippling.
No, the people these strikes are really going to hurt are ordinary working families, those in society who already have the fewest options in life and who now, at the one time of year when even they can usually afford themselves a little fun and levity, find themselves well and truly stuffed.
Take my cleaning lady. I hesitate to call her that because she is so much more than a cleaning lady. I consider her a friend (and I hope she feels the same), someone I’ve known for years and who has seen me through the good times and the bad. She’s kind, intelligent, generous to a fault. She’s had my back when so many haven’t.
Often we just drink coffee and eat pastel de nata (she’s Portuguese) and put the world to rights.
She relies on trains to get her to her various jobs around London. She normally does two houses a day, one in the morning, one in the afternoon, plus a few in between and visits a couple of old ladies who need her for shopping and cooking. This is a busy time of year for her, and she often works extra hours. But this week she will simply have no way of getting to work. And if she can’t work, she won’t get paid (I will obviously pay her come what may, but not everyone can). At precisely the time of year when she needs her wages the most, she’s going to be seriously out of pocket. There are countless others like her. Private sector workers, who pay just as much tax as anyone else, except they’re on zero hours contracts and don’t have anything like the job security or perks of those in the public sector, let alone a bruiser like Lynch to hold their employer, aka the British taxpayer, to ransom. They too are having their wages eroded by inflation, they too are facing higher fuel and food bills. But now they also have to deal with Lynch and his members obstructing their ability to work. It’s just not fair.
This is the one time of year when many in this sector – bar workers, catering staff, those in hospitality, hairdressers, nail bar workers, you name it – have the chance to make a bit of extra cash. Instead, businesses are cancelling Christmas parties left, right and centre, shoppers are staying away and those who can are planning to just work from home. The irony of Lynch and his cronies demanding eye-watering pay rises for his members while engineering an economic shutdown that will only deepen the current crisis will not be lost on readers.
And even if you, like me, have some sympathy for some of the striking sectors, such as nurses and paramedics, it is hard to forgive them for choosing to ruin the first chance of a proper Christmas that many people will have had since Covid.
Because make no mistake: what they’re effectively engineering here is a fourth lockdown.
And not just any lockdown: a Christmas lockdown.
Peace and goodwill to all men? Not if Starmer and Lynch get their way.