Militant unions are gambling with their own jobs

Britain is in decline. It’s probably irreversible and doesn’t bother me for reasons I’ll scandalise you with later, but if the unions imagine they can seize this moment to grab as much cash as possible, like the last round of the Crystal Maze, they’ve made a big mistake. Their industries are on the slide, too. They’re simply hastening it.

I can’t be the only one to notice that my mantelpiece had far fewer Christmas cards this year – not just because the strikes mean they’ll finally arrive in June but many customers will have judged it wasn’t worth the exorbitant price of a stamp to send one. We have e-cards now, and there are other couriers besides Royal Mail.

Of course the RMT thinks its got the government over a barrel because people will always use trains. But very few Britons did so during lockdown, and some of those returning to work have lost the habit, preferring to bus, drive or work from home instead.

Their lives are probably better for it. When the rail strikes first took effect, my initial thought was “who can tell?” The service was appalling to begin with. In 2019, the World Economic Forum ranked the quality of our railways as 29th out of 101 countries, far behind those exciting worlds of tomorrow, Indonesia and Panama.

One sample morning, I arrived at my local station to find every ticket machine broken and only one ticket office open. No rush: trains were late. Onboard, standing room only. For the return stretch, all trains were cancelled or delayed due to signal failure and a fire (perhaps the signal blew up).

If anything, my commute has improved during the strikes because the one train scheduled each hour has at least been on time (no traffic on the tracks), and the empty seats remind me of the golden age of travel during Covid, when it was possible to get a carriage entirely to yourself. Though the sadists who run our Matrix simulation still insisted that passengers wear a mask, presumably to reduce the risk of infecting oneself.

Yes, the railways were also miserable when nationalised, though I agree with the RMT’s complaint that privatisation has meant poor planning and underinvestment. The problem is that walking off the job won’t improve things; it’ll drive away yet more customers, cutting revenue, lowering standards further and eventually reducing my morning service to one of those two-man hand cars they used in silent films.

Militant unions seem allied with bad management, greedy corporations and short-sighted ministers to destroy the very jobs the unions seek to protect. As for the consumer, a generation is coming up that will regard our terrible, overpriced transport network not as a means to an end but an obstacle to be avoided. If the development of the rail network, like Royal Mail, was about getting our country moving and better integrated, I’d place money on a return to the situation pre-19th century: static populations working in cottage industries.

Thing is, doesn’t that sound rather… conservative? A step backward can sometimes steady one’s balance.

I’d feel less anxious about decline if we were honest about it: if we can no longer travel cheaply or well, fine, just warn us so we can adjust our lifestyles accordingly. Politicians should do the same. Rishi Sunak sees himself as our trouble-shooter in chief, which is what he’s paid to do, but he should also explain what he cannot do, either because it’s unaffordable or undesirable for the state to try to fix every little problem. Likewise, if we are no longer a major power – a sunset that the Left revels in – this must mean we cannot afford military adventures or reparations. Decline necessitates a focus on mending things at home.

I am an anti-growth conservative. In fact, I’d quite like Britain to shrink. We’ve been outgrowing ourselves for far too long, imagining that all our problems could be solved with non-jobs, motorways, concreting over the countryside and fancy coffee. None of this has made us any happier, and it hasn’t even provided the rise in living standards we were promised.

It is not some law of nature that one generation will be richer than the other. It is, however, virtuous to live modestly and within the national means.

Aaron Burr, Sir

I’ve been enormously enjoying the ghost stories of Edith Wharton, the American author most famous for The Age of Innocence. She did for ghosts what Angela Carter did for fairytales, updating via feminism and Freud. Her spirits are rarely the walking dead but manifestations of greed, repression and violence, stalking the grand houses and snowy landscapes of New England. “Afterward” is probably her best tale, with a twist worthy of M Night Shyamalan.

I’m also working my way through Gore Vidal’s American history novels. The best thus far has been Burr, his re-imagining of the life of Aaron Burr, the vice president who, in 1804, shot Alexander Hamilton dead in a duel.

Hamilton is now the hero of a multi-million dollar musical phenomenon, but Vidal firmly takes the side of his assassin. In the 1970s, the composer Leonard Bernstein asked Vidal for help on a musical about the early history of the White House. Vidal declined. “Poor Leni,” said Gore, regarding the idea as a doomed enterprise. “They’ll never make a Broadway musical about the Founding Fathers. I just can’t see Jefferson and Hamilton dancing across the stage.”