Train staff have enjoyed pay rises and job security for years - David Behrens

The people behind it are well-intentioned individuals who volunteer at grassroots level to improve their local stations, tend to the flower beds and build bridges, so to speak, with travellers.

If only the same were true of the people who actually work on the railways.

Rail Week was barely into its second day when the RMT union announced that 91 per cent of its voting members supported going on strike over jobs, pay and conditions. The likely outcome is that unless the Government intervenes with draconian new laws, there will be barely any trains at all for the foreseeable future, and the lack of movement of vital goods will bring the real prospect of power cuts, fuel shortages and empty supermarket shelves. So whether we give the trains a try or not, we’ll all suffer.

And it’s not simply about the take-home pay of the workers themselves – they are just pawns in a battle between their union and ministers over who really governs Britain. In that respect there are obvious parallels with the miners’ strike of 1984, the last time a once-powerful union tried to hold the country to ransom. But there are also important differences, for while colliery workers risked their lives in conditions that seem unconscionable just a few decades later, train staff are on a uniquely cushy number – a fact which is plain to everyone but them.

They’ve enjoyed unprecedented job security and years of guaranteed pay rises – so far from taking pity, one might actually wonder what the heck they are moaning about.

Yes, pay has been frozen in much of the industry since the pandemic, and inflation has gone through the roof – but universal woes don’t justify giving one group of workers preferential treatment over everyone else.

And despite the headline ballot result, not all rail workers are even complaining. Only 71 per cent of RMT members chose to vote at all, and while that’s enough for a quorum, it’s not the landslide their shop stewards would have us believe. It’s the union itself that is choreographing the anger for its own ends, for it knows that if it can’t halt the trains when it wants, it ceases to be viable.

This has already caused a schism in the organisation. Mick Cash, its appropriately-named former general secretary who pocketed £163,000 in 2020, stepped down at the end of that year, blaming harassment by “factional groupings” who “seized every opportunity to undermine and frustrate” his efforts.

It was Cash who orchestrated two years of strikes at Northern Rail and who set in motion the current dispute at Transpennine Express which is making Sunday travel almost impossible at the moment. Yet he’s a veritable liberal compared to Mick Lynch, his firebrand successor whose delusions of power have been fed by wilting, flaccid managements.

But in repeating his ambition to lead “the biggest strike in a generation” Lynch is channelling a fallen hero – Arthur Scargill, the Yorkshire miners’ leader whom Bernard Ingham, the Number 10 press secretary at the time, called “the stupidest general ever”.

Scargill’s trademark tactic of sending flying pickets to other pits to halt the movement of coal was denied him when Bernard’s boss, Margaret Thatcher, made the practice illegal. And that’s a cautionary tale for Lynch because under the present government, history might just repeat itself.

The Transport Minister, Grant Shapps, threatened last weekend to outlaw industrial action unless minimum crewing levels were maintained. This was decried by the RMT, in the same way that Scargill tried to shout down the Tories of his era – but for Shapps it’s a chance to seize the initiative. Decisive action at this stage could salvage a little of what’s left of his government’s reputation, and – more importantly – make the rail industry and its working practices fit for the age of HS2.

It may be a now-or-never chance to do so, because if he fails there is very little chance of any of us volunteering to give the train a try ever again.