Mick Lynch is back schooling journalists as the RMT goes on strike

Mick Lynch has hit back at interviewers again as he joined RMT workers on strike


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Mick Lynch is back at it. The Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) union leader has attacked the government as rail workers go on strike. Lynch accused the government of wasting millions on a ‘futile war’ with the unions.

Lynch wrote a withering letter to the government over their conduct:

There is further strike action on the railways on Friday because workers, passengers and taxpayers are being asked to pay the price for the government’s disastrous mismanagement of the economy and public transport.

As ever, he joined picketing workers on the frontline:

Tory chaos

In his letter to the government, Lynch put the blame firmly on the Tories:

Rather than deliver a plan to improve public transport and the economy, we have seen three Prime Ministers preside over a year of chaos since the first strike action in June 2022.

He also pointed out that in other nations in the union, there had been less antagonism. Mainly because the English Tories were viciously anti-worker:

In contrast, there is no strike action on railways controlled by the Scottish and Welsh governments because these governments have adopted a fair and less ideological approach to industrial relations.

Elsewhere, Lynch ran rings around an interviewer with typical style:

Futile war

The Tories have been waging a futile war against workers, Lynch said. And the cost was being borne by the taxpayer:

Instead of working to end the dispute, amidst a cost-of-living crisis it appears to have no idea how to tackle, the UK government has spent the last year squandering billions of pounds on a futile war against the rail unions, all in the name of delivering reforms that passengers do not want.

Lynch even put a figure on it:

The cumulative cost of this disastrous strategy is now estimated at £5 billion.

And the RMT leader spelt it out in another press interview. If it wasn’t for the Tories’ anti-worker views, the issue could be settled in days:

Workers’ success

Speaking at a picket at London’s Euston Station, Lynch said the workers had enjoyed a lot of success against the bosses:

We’ve pushed them [rail bosses] back on all the stuff they wanted to do – they wanted to make thousands of our people redundant, they wanted to shut every booking office in Britain, restructure our engineering workers, [and] cut the catering service.

However, he added:

What we haven’t got is a pay deal, we haven’t got any guarantees on our members’ futures, but we have stopped them doing the worst aspects of their proposals and their ideas.

And in another media interview as the strikes launched, the union leader made a fool of a presenter who suggested an app could do the job of rail workers:

Once again, Lynch and the RMT are leading the way for working people. With the Labour Party more concerned with flopping about uselessly and draping itself in the Union Jack, it’s down to organised workers to fight for what they need.

Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/Endim8, cropped to 1910 x 1000, licenced under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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  • Show Comments

    1. Framing for articles is really important, as is viewpoint/perspective, including rejecting the perspective of those who’s view you oppose. For instance, ideas about “taxpayers footing the bill” and things “costing the taxpayers” accept the framing of market society perspectives that claim, falsely, that taxation funds government spending, when it doesn’t (you can ask the treasury to clarify how govt finances its spending, and they will tell you that govt spending and money creation are one and the same). This can then be directly rejected. Also, states are not funded by markets, states provide that foundational basis upon which markets can develop, which is a matter if historical record. States provide the legislative framework, infrastructure and bureaucratic arrangements, as well as currency, that mean that contracts can be agreed with sufficient trust, lines of credit can be offered, and that a currency will be viewed as having sufficient credibility to be useful. Without the state providing all of these things, no market could exist. The framing/perspective of market society ideologues can be rejected out hand because it has no basis in fact. Govts with fiat currencies, such as the UK can always fund, as long as people are available to do the needed work, anything it wishes to. The govt, captured as it has been by corporate (and neoliberal) interests and on whose behalf it speaks, is lying whenever is says that something cannot be funded. It has simply making a false excuse to hide what it early means, which is that it is being told by those more powerful interests that they have been bought by to not fund those things, which is a very different story. Audrey Lorde said that the Master’s tools will not dismantle the master’s house. The left has capitulated to the right’s fundamentally and demonstrably false perspective time and time again. Only by rejecting that perspective and saying what is factually (albeit contingently) the case within current structures and systems, will movement to an alternative be possible. The right repeats it’s lies mercilessly. Only by explicitly rejecting those lies outright, and explicitly repeating the actual case, will any change be possible. Only when enough people know that state spending is fundamentally different from household spending (i.e. govt’s income and expenditure are the same thing, unlike households whose income is separate to its spending) and that govt debt is the basis of everyone else’s savings (including pensions), indeed that, without govt spending all markets would immediately collapse in fear (Chomsky has generously said that they would survive about 3 seconds), evidence for the impossibility of a market-based society being amply demonstrated by the 2007/08 death of the global banking system, and impossibility of markets surviving COVID-19. Leftwing media need to be much bolder in it’s utter rejection of capitalist and other rightwing dogma.

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    2. Canary’s relentless support for corporate unions and their aristocracy is unconvincing. Neither Mr Lynch, the RMT nor any of the other business unions are remotely interested in furthering the interests of the working class which necessarily involves revolting against the capitalist structures of the UK. Instead, they compromise, vacillate and do deals with the class enemy of the workers: the employers and the Tory government. It will be no different when Starmer’s equally business-friendly party takes over.

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