The British unions are about to fall into a trap

The RMT Union is calling a rail strike in the UK. This risks creating a battle with the government that could help them win the next election.

For most of the week of June 20th, the RMT Union is calling the largest rail strike in 30 years. On Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, there will be virtually no trains in the UK.

Coming just after the pandemic, a lot of activity is just moving back online. However, the news is already full of stories of businesses, especially in hospitality, that are just beginning to recover from the pandemic being slammed by cancellations and losses. School children, who have been studying from home and seeing the exams that define their futures disrupted by the pandemic are again being trapped at home, just at the end of their first in-person exam period. There are plenty of genuine stories of how this rail strike will hit everyday people, struggling businesses, and the very workers the unions claim they are fighting for.

The RMT wants pay rises to account for inflation, which is predicted to rise to 11% this year. The rail industry wants modernisation — for example, adoption of technology that will require fewer workers to do manual tasks, but equally may create new jobs for those able to retrain into them.

The RMT Union blames the government for not intervening. The government say it is not for them to get involved in an industrial dispute. The government had to bail out the railway industry during the pandemic, and even now rail use has only returned to about 75% of its pre-pandemic levels.

Sir Keir Starmer, leader of the opposition Labour party says the government could have prevented these strikes but chose not to in order to create a fight with the unions. The RMT leader says he favours a general strike, and pundits are warning of a ‘summer of discontent,’ an echo of the Winter of Discontent in the 1970s, when unions brought the country to a standstill.

So what is going on?

In the 1970s, when inflation was shooting up and the unions demanded, and won, large pay rises, this created an inflationary spiral, where the higher wages forced up prices in order to pay those wages, which forced up inflation, which led to more strikes, more wage hikes, more inflation, etc. The rest, quite literally, is history, and the unions today seem to be keen to ignore that bit of the history.

One has to assume that if the government, which has just funded the pandemic, has to raise public sector wages anywhere near in line with inflation, then that extra money in the economy will cause both higher spending, and higher costs. Presumably this will just worsen the inflation, and push the country into recession.

With the railway in particular, given that it has been so badly hit over the last few years and people have not fully returned to using trains, mass rail strikes will just push people away from using trains, making the situation for the railway industry worse, forcing further cuts and redundancies. Again, this doesn’t make the RMT’s strikes seem very wise.

Given that the Conservative government has shown clearly that it exists primarily just to stay in power for power’s sake, and Boris Johnson in particular has shown that he is the only thing he really believes in, one should assume Starmer is right and the government will welcome these strikes. Mass strikes by radical unions will allow Johnson & Co to goad the Labour party to disown the strikes, which they cannot do because the party is supported financailly by unions, and relies on union supporters for votes. They will then be able to blame the whole Labour movement and all unions for the actions of these more radical unions. After a pandemic, with most people facing a cost of living crisis, it is unlikely striking rail workers will elicit much symapthy from the British people.

The RMT and other unions are therefore walking into a trap set by the Conservative government. They will strike and strike, bringing misery and disruption in the wake of the pandemic. Businesses will fail, people will lose their jobs, the rail industry will deteriorate, and they will not get their pay rises. Johnson and his government will blame the Labour party and the unions for all the misery, and people will believe him.

The RMT and union leaders are very compelling when they explain why they are striking. The people — the workers — are suffering from years and years of incompetent Conservative government, poor economic policy, corruption, lies, and policies that have seen the rich get a lot richer. The UK is slipping into recession, and is predicted by the OECD next year to have the second lowest economic growth after Russia. Productivity in the UK has been slowing for decades, mainly under the Conservative governments. Again, weak policies, big mistakes, and poor government are to blame.

However, the only way this will change is with a change of government. Labour has not yet reached a point at which it is obviously more electable than the Conservatives, but the Tories are managing to make themselves less and less electable, gradually catching down with the Labour party. Labour stand a good chance of winning the next election if they just sit quietly and wait.

But the RMT are about to fall into the trap set for them by Boris Johnson. If they create a summer of strikes, they risk damning the Labour party, reviving Tory calls that Labour is the party of Corbyn and hard-liners, and causing a Conservative win at the next election.

Reading this, you may wonder about my politics, but this is not about party politics. The reality is that this current government is so bad that even 40% of Conservative politicians have no confidence in this Conservative prime minister. The Conservatives have given this country three of the worst prime ministers in modern history, all in a row. They have caused huge harm at every level — Cameron’s Brexit is causing huge economic harm; May’s ‘hostile environment’ is still pushing the country to extremes of xenophobia even now, empowering the anti-immigrant child of immigrants, Priti Patel, and her disgraceful Rwanda policy. Boris Johnson… well, where to start.

There comes a time when a party has been in power for too long. It becomes stale, corrupt, inward looking, and increasingly focussed on elections over real policy. Another feature of this decay is that all the talented people have been fired, resigned, or pushed onto the back benches. That happened at the end of the last Labour era, and the end of the previous Conservative era. We are ready now for a refresh, and it is most likely that will mean a Labour government, because our system isn’t designed to allow anything else.

Corbyn, Momentum, and the hard left ignored the reality that the UK is really just not very left wing and isn’t looking for a class war or worker’s revolution. Blair understood that the only way for Labour to win was to conquer the centre-ground. Nothing has changed. Starmer has been patiently steering the party back to a space where it could win power. The RMT risk wrecking that and damning the very workers they are trying to protect to another 5 years of Conservative misrule. Instead, they should focus on helping Labour win the next election and then support bringing about real economic and social change. A general strike would be short-sighted.