Support for Mick Lynch’s strikes is crumbling – he’s using shoppers and commuters as cannon fodder
SUPPORT for Mick Lynch’s bid to topple the Government is crumbling.
Our figures today on rail workers’ pay won’t help him.
He and his militant RMT mob are now isolated, having turned down a pay deal already accepted by other unions and backed by a third of his own members.
No, nine per cent over two years doesn’t match the current temporary spike in inflation.
Few pay rises do.
But consider the already lavish earnings of huge numbers of rail workers.
Hundreds of signallers and engineers on six figures. Another 650 on £80,000.
One in four track maintenance workers on £60,000. The average pay of RMT strikers estimated at around £38,000.
They are not relying on food banks.
Many are motivated by hard-left politics, by kicking out the Tories, by keeping absurd working practices that should have died in the 1980s and by feathering already comfortable nests.
Shoppers and commuters are cannon fodder in meathead Mick’s political war.
So are the stricken businesses, and their employees, facing ruin as their Christmas trade is wrecked by trains that won’t run.
No, Minister
FORTY years ago TV’s classic “Yes, Minister” spoofed a civil service dedicated to running Britain as it saw fit while thwarting elected politicians at every turn.
Whitehall’s modern penpushers plainly consider it an instruction manual.
Their condemnation by Lord Frost is timely.
As an ex-civil servant, adviser and minister he has seen up close their resistance to change, their lethargy, incompetence and unaccountability.
Some do good work. Too many are useless, obstructive clock-watchers.
If Britain looks increasingly ungovernable, they are partly why. So our sympathy with their pay demands is limited.
And the prospect of a strike by elite young Oxbridge graduates hand-picked for plum Whitehall careers-for-life is truly laughable.
BBC blindness
EVEN now some BBC bigwigs and peers cannot grasp the flaw with the licence fee.
Ex-chief Lord Hall concedes it’s unfair — but merely wants it reformed, with the poor paying less and the rich more.
Its problem, though, is not that it’s not “progressive”.
It’s that a compulsory tax on our TVs is plain wrong — a ridiculous anachronism in the subscription age.
No one, rich or poor, should be forced by law to fund any broadcaster, not least one with so little interest in the millions who vote Tory or back Brexit.
Ask the better-off to pay even more and they will switch off live TV en masse and swerve the fee entirely.
The House of Lords feebly protests that only a continued compulsory levy can fund the Beeb as it stands.
In which case it must reform — and cut back until it CAN support itself.