Ross Clark

Mick Lynch told Mishal Husain this week that it is about time she started showing partiality to Britain’s working people. Leave aside the assertion that the BBC should break its impartiality guidelines to please Mick Lynch, is he really representing the working classes? Unless you count as ‘working class’ everyone who does any paid work, the answer is somewhat questionable. The fact is that members of the Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) union are significantly better off than Britain’s working population as a whole. Forget Lynch’s flat cap image: judged by income alone, the RMT’s rail members are thoroughly middle class.

We are still a long way from the Winter of Discontent, when 29.5 million worker-days were lost to strikes. Nevertheless, with today’s strike of 115,000 postal workers the number is creeping inexorably upwards. This one-day strike alone will cost 40 per cent of the 273,000 lost working days recorded across all industries over the whole of 2018. To describe Britain as being in the grip of a wave of public sector strikes isn’t quite accurate. The 115,000 Royal Mail workers who have walked out today are not public sector workers. Nor are the train drivers, guards and other train staff who have been striking, on and off, for much of the past decade. All are employees of private companies, yet their unions have still managed to engineer national strikes.

For those of us who remember the miners’ strike in the 1980s it takes some getting used to the journey made by coal miners over the past 40 years: from working class heroes to climate ‘criminals’. To hear today’s reaction to the news that Michael Gove has granted permission to build Britain’s first deep coal mine for a generation is to step through the looking glass into a bizarre world where a Conservative government is considered evil for helping to create mining jobs in a de-industrialised region – and the ‘enlightened’ position is to eradicate the very last traces of the coal industry. Lord Deben, chair of the government’s Climate Change Committee, thinks Gove’s decision to be ‘indefensible’.

Rail strikes on a couple of days when no trains would be running anyway might not seem the biggest inconvenience facing the British public at the moment, yet the announcement of yet another walkout from the evening of 24 December to the morning of 27 December will have implications for many services: this is the window when a lot of track maintenance is scheduled. That now promises to spill over into the New Year to an even greater extent than in normal years.    By calling a Christmas strike – something he previously said he wouldn’t do – RMT leader Mick Lynch is not looking like a man who is close to doing a deal with his employers; rather someone who is knuckling down for the long-haul.

Staging rebellions against their own government has become a way of life for many Tory MPs – but why choose onshore wind farms as the hill on which to die? If Rishi Sunak concedes to the demands of a group of (reportedly) around 50 MPs and lifts the moratorium on onshore wind which has been in place for seven years, it won’t take long before we find out why it was imposed in the first place. There are few places in England where you can build a wind farm of any size without either causing serious annoyance to locals or compromising valued landscapes. Most of our lowlands are so densely packed with housing that it is hard to find sites which are not within half a mile of residential properties, while many of our upland areas are national parks or some other designation.

Imagine if Jeremy Hunt announced a new 60p income tax band that was payable only by people who earn less than £20,000 a year. Or if he reversed council tax so that Band A homes paid three times as much tax as Band G homes, rather than the other way round. There would be more than outrage, perhaps riots. Why, then, do things work so differently with green taxes?  Today, Sadiq Khan has announced that London’s ultra-low emissions zone (Ulez) will be extended to cover the entire city, rather than just the area inside the north and south circular roads as at present. It will mean drivers of non-compliant vehicles having to pay a daily charge of £12.50 to use the roads. Yet where is the opposition?

The rail unions have announced further strikes for December and January. Nurses have already voted to strike for the first time in over a century. Now university lecturers, postal workers and Scottish teachers have joined in. So are we headed for a second Winter of Discontent – emulating the last months of the Callaghan government in 1979, when the rubbish piled up in Leicester Square and the dead went unburied? Things would have to get a whole lot worse before we get anywhere close to matching that grim season. In 1979, the number of days lost to strikes reached a post-war peak, at 29.5 million. Last time the unions threatened a national strike, in response to the coalition cuts in 2011 the figure was 1.4 million. But even 1979 looks mild compared with what went before.