Caving in to train drivers will lead to more ludicrous pay demands and strikes: Bill Carmichael

The government’s “tough negotiations” consisted of immediately caving in and giving the union everything they wanted - a 5 per cent rise backdated for 2022/23, a 4.75 per cent rise for 2023/24, and a further 4.5 per cent increase for 2024/25. To put this into perspective the current rate of UK inflation is just 2.2 per cent.

I suspect the union negotiators couldn’t quite believe their luck, particularly when the government side explained what they wanted in return, which was … er, absolutely nothing.

The government dropped the previous Conservative administration’s demand for the modernisation of outdated industrial practices that date back to the steam age, to make the railways more productive and reliable, and to ease the burden on taxpayers who subsidise the rail system to the tune of something approaching £11 billion a year.

In short the unions received lots of free money courtesy of the poor bloody taxpayer who is expected to fork out billions more in return for precisely sod all.

Those of us old enough to remember the industrial strife of the 1970s have seen this big extortion racket play out before. The unions fund the Labour Party, which, once in government, raises taxes to funnel massive amounts of public money back to the unions in the form of large public sector pay rises, and then the unions give some of that cash back to the Labour Party - and so the unvirtuous circle continues, until the system runs out of other people’s money and collapses in a heap.

Back in the 70s the UK was gripped in something akin to a death spiral with the unions leapfrogging each other with ever more insane wage demands. And if they didn’t get what they wanted, they were quite happy to damage the economy and immiserate millions of ordinary workers.

That is precisely what happened in 1976 when Britain ended up so broke that the Labour Chancellor, Dennis Healey, was forced to go cap in hand to the International Monetary Fund to beg for a record loan to keep the country from total collapse.

It took the sheer, bloodyminded courage of Margaret Thatcher to finally say no to the unions, and a decade of hard grind to return some semblance of sanity to the public finances.

I do hope we are not seeing a rerun of the 70s with today’s government, but given their performance so far I am not exactly filled with confidence.

One person who is happy this week is Transport Secretary and Sheffield Heeley MP, Louise Haigh, who hailed the decision to give her chums in the union everything they wanted as somehow a tremendous victory for paying passengers.

At last, she said, the two-year dispute, which had cost £800 million in lost revenue and caused untold misery to passengers, was finally over. She proudly boasted that Labour had “put an end” to industrial action on the railways.

“Er…not so fast!” said the unions. The drivers’ union Aslef barely had time to pocket the cash bonanza they had been gifted before - yes, you’ve guessed it - they announced another wave of strikes. There’s gratitude for you!

What message is capitulating to big wage demands giving workers in the public sector? I’ll tell you in the words of St Matthew’s Gospel: “Ask, and it shall be given you.” If you reward people for going on strike, you are going to end up with a lot more strikes.

One thing to remember here is that the job of driving trains is ripe for automation, particularly with the impact of artificial intelligence (AI). In the UK we have had driverless trains, with few problems, in London’s docklands since 1987. In Japan they are aiming to have fully driverless trains on parts of the network by the middle of the next decade.

Soon train drivers will go the way of Linotype operators, knocker-uppers, gas lamplighters, and encyclopaedia salesmen.

And when that day comes and they ask for sympathy because robots are taking their jobs, remember their greed, their belligerence, and their utter indifference to the misery they have inflicted on working people who could never dream of earning £70,000 a year, and allow yourself a little smile.