In a largely fake speech last week, Grant Shaps, the transport minister, warned railroad workers that they could lose their jobs if they went on strike. We all know what he meant; anything that exacerbates Britain’s newly-discovered middle-class love affair with homework will further undermine the railroad, making it commercially unviable.
However, the threat is hollow, and Lynch knows it. Shaps seemed to be enjoying the prospect of a confrontation with railway workers to distract attention from the government’s growing catalog of political mistakes. As a supposed hammer of the unions, Shaps also hopes to bathe the government in respect for Thatcher. There is little else in the Johnson administration that is Thatcher, so it will just have to be done.
The fact is, however, that no modern economy can function successfully without a functioning public transport system. The railroad is still struggling, all these decades later, to recover from the Beech Cuts, which carried the ax to large parts of the network in the 1960s and nearly ended the connectivity between the country that the government now trying half-heartedly. to revive as part of its leveling program.
If Mr Schaps is seriously considering a new round of redundancies, this shows a remarkable ignorance of the building blocks needed for productive economic growth.
Even driverless cars would not be a substitute for the mass transport system that provides rail transport. RMT or not, the government must find a way to make the railways work.
With low inflation and low interest rates, living standards have tended to improve slightly over much of the last three decades. Unemployment is low, and declining mortgage costs have more than offset the weak state of real wage growth. But now inflation is rising, and for the first time in 30 years, mortgage spending is rising again. For many people, the ferocity of the current squeeze is a whole new experience.
It is true that there are still many jobs – in fact, more vacancies than there are unemployed. At the top of the income scale is a desperate battle for talent, with employers offering substantial wage increases to attract and retain staff.
There are also many jobs at the bottom of the rock that were previously occupied by Eastern European migrant workers, but for which there is a limited appetite among locals. In many cases, salaries are simply not enough to pay the constantly inflating bills.
The once prosperous middle ground is being pressed in a similar way. This poses major problems for Downing Street as it struggles to keep public sector pay limits. If there is public money to be spent, many Tory MPs would prefer it to be dedicated to tax cuts rather than public sector pay. But from teachers to doctors, public sector employees have none of this. The government clearly needs to act urgently on its promise from the 2019 manifesto and pass legislation to ensure minimum train service during industrial operations.
Still, RMT’s Mick Lynch is just an outsider. There will be many more people who want to emulate his militancy in the coming years. In the end, it seems to work. Welcome back to strike-hit Britain.
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