Mick Lynch is stuck in the past

Mick Lynch, the general secretary of the RMT, has never felt truly English. In conversation with Iain Dale at the Edinburgh festival, he reveals that his parents moved here from Ireland during the war and settled in the Ladbroke Grove area of London where they raised him and his four siblings.

His father was ‘an archetypal Paddy’ who visited the pub six times a week including Sunday afternoons after Mass. In 1971 he went on strike for nine weeks and the family were reduced to living off jam sandwiches. His parents always referred to ‘the English’ as if they were foreigners and Lynch has never held a British passport. He’s an Irish citizen.

He looks back on the 1970s as a golden age of prosperity and security: ‘Things were getting better for the working classes.’ His dad worked in factories and for the Royal Mail and his mother had a job at Marks and Spencer where the management was ‘benign’ towards the staff. Leaving school at 15, in 1978, he began an electrical apprenticeship and joined a union. Work was plentiful back then and he describes his part of north-west London as ‘the biggest industrial area in Europe….we made things and people bought them and we exported them.’

Then along came Mrs Thatcher and she set about destroying this economic powerhouse in London – although Lynch doesn’t explain why she was so hostile to hard work, profit and exports. He’s deeply gloomy about our current socioeconomic position. ‘Wages are going to the bottom, the working-class is getting poorer, the housing market robs people blind.’ And the source of our woes? ‘Forty years of Thatcherism brought us to where we are today.’

Lynch is best known for leading the RMT during the 14-month-long rail dispute. He claims that ‘[the government] has lost the argument out there’ and that his strike retains wide public support. He condemns the government’s tactics as fundamentally unfair. The Treasury covers the losses incurred by the rail network during strike days so Lynch’s union can’t squeeze the bosses financially as they could in the past.

But is that unfair or nifty footwork by the government? The minimum level of service guarantee also curtails his power. ‘I have to provide the labour to break my own strike,’ he complains. And if he refuses, ‘they’ll shut down the union.’

The present sticking point involves 2,300 staff who work in ticket offices, ‘which are part of the hub that keeps the community going.’ And he finds the current deal unacceptable. ‘They say, if you let us cut 2,300 workers you can have a pay rise.’ Ultimately, he worries that strikes will be completely abolished, ‘as in China’, and that workers in future will exist like ‘battery chickens’ at Amazon warehouses.

He’s scathing about senior Tories, and he calls energy secretary Grant Shapps ‘a yappie dog’ and police minister Chris Philp ‘a failed businessman’. Both, he says, ‘are not captains of industry, they’re chancers’.

The RMT is unaffiliated to Labour so he feels free to criticise Keir Starmer. ‘He’s not an intellectual heavyweight. He hasn’t got a soul.’ Lynch’s advice is to promote Labour as the party of vision and moral probity as Clement Attlee did in 1945. ‘Churchill won on personality. Attlee crushed him with values.’ As for the Tories, Lynch summarises their policies in three words, ‘I hate foreigners.’

Brexit crops up and Lynch offers the Scottish audience a warning from Ireland. ‘Sovereignty belongs in Frankfurt. And EU policy is not made in the EU parliament but by the council of ministers.’ He still supports Brexit because the reforms favoured by Jeremy Corbyn, whom he evidently admires, ‘would be illegal in the EU’.

Unlock unlimited access, free for a month

then subscribe from as little as £1 a week after that

SUBSCRIBE

Asked about the future of unionism, his advice is stuck in the past. ‘Join a union. Get active in the workplace.’ And that’s it. He hopes for wider union membership in the digital industries but he seems unaware that this will accelerate the dash for AI.

Personally, he’s not a computer wizard and he still marvels at Zoom technology. ‘Talking to a person you can see on-screen is something for Spock, Bones and Kirk. Next, they’ll bring in the teleportation machine – and then the RMT will be in real trouble.’