In a far-reaching speech last week, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps warned railroad workers that they were at risk of losing their jobs if they continued their strike. We all know what he meant; Anything that reinforces Britain’s newly discovered middle-class love story with work at home further undermines the railroad, making it commercially unviable.
However, the threat is empty, and Lynch knows it. Shapps seemed to delight in the prospect of a confrontation with railroad workers, to better distract himself from the government’s growing catalog of political mistakes. As an alleged hammer of the unions, Shapps also hopes to bathe the government in thatcherite respectability. Little else about the Johnson administration is Thatcherite, so that just needs to be done.
However, the fact is that no modern economy can function successfully without a functioning public transportation system. The railroad continues to struggle, all these decades later, to recover from the “Beech Cuts,” which brought the ax to much of the network in the 1960s and nearly wiped out connectivity across the country that the government now try halfway through. relive as part of your “leveling” agenda.
If Mr. Shapps is seriously thinking about a new round of cuts, showing a remarkable ignorance of the basics needed for productive economic growth.
Even driverless cars would not be a substitute for the public transportation system offered by the railroad. RMT or not, the government must find a way to make the railways work.
With low inflation and low interest rates, the standard of living has been on a slight upward trend for much of the last three decades. Unemployment has been low and falling 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 costs are rising again. For many people, the ferocity of the current pressure is a whole new experience.
It is true that there are still many jobs around: more job offers, in fact, than unemployed ones. At the top of the income ladder is a desperate battle for talent, with employers offering sharp pay raises to attract and retain staff.
There are also many jobs at the bottom of the ladder that used to occupy migrant labor from Eastern Europe, but for which there is little appetite among locals. In many cases, wages are simply not enough to pay the increasingly inflated bills.
The midpoint, which was once prosperous, is being compressed in the same way. This poses major problems for Downing Street, as it struggles to maintain the public sector wage line. If there is public money to be spent, many Conservative MPs would rather spend it on tax cuts than pay the public sector. But from teachers to doctors, public sector workers have nothing. The government obviously needs to act urgently on its promise of the 2019 manifesto and legislate to ensure a minimum train service during industrial action.
However, Mick Lynch of the RMT is only the most advanced. There will be many more who seek to emulate their militancy in the coming years. After all, it seems to work. Welcome back to the strike in Britain.