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ROSS CLARK
Rail pay rise shock shows Labour is a soft touch on pay – now other unions will come back for more and more
Already the Government are losing control of public finances, and blaming the Conservatives
IT took just 24 hours for the new era of “grown-up” relations between government and rail unions to break down.
A day after Aslef had recommended its members to accept a 14 per cent pay offer over three years, the train drivers’ union boss Mick Whelan was back, this time announcing three months’ worth of strikes on LNER, which runs services between London, Leeds and Edinburgh.
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It follows two years of walkouts passengers have already had to endure.
LNER, by the way, is one of the franchises which has already been nationalised — so don’t think things are going to be better once Labour fulfils its promise of bringing all rail services back under state control.
The new strikes, at least notionally, are about rostering. But it is better seen as a power game.
The rail unions don’t just want to represent their members’ interests — they want to run the railways themselves.
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All so predictable
They correctly worked out that a Starmer Government would cave in to its pay demands, not least because the Labour Party relies on union money.
Aslef itself has donated more than £200,000 over the past four years.
It was all so predictable what would happen in this arena once Labour was in power.
Rishi Sunak’s Government passed a law which obliged unions to guarantee at least a skeleton service on strike days.
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Yet one of Labour’s first acts was to repeal that law — putting massive power back into the hands of the unions which, of course, they have ruthlessly exercised.
Can anyone explain why a train driver deserves to be paid a basic salary of £70,000, twice as much as many nurses earn and a level which puts them in the top ten per cent of earners in Britain?
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With overtime, some drivers earn £100,000. True, it is a position of great responsibility, given what havoc a train driver can cause by driving a crowded train through a red signal. Yet it is also a job which lends itself naturally to automation.
There are more than a hundred metro systems around the world which already run with no drivers whatsoever.
This isn’t futuristic technology, driverless trains have been running since the 1980s with very high levels of safety.
London Underground’s Victoria Line was nearly fully automated when it opened in the late 1960s.
There, the drivers merely open and close the doors. The previous Government once or twice suggested it might start automating the Tube — yet it never had the nerve to take on the unions.
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Labour’s Transport Minister Louise Haigh granted fat pay rises without even demanding reforms to the restrictive practices rife in the rail industry.
Still, there is no obligation for drivers to work on Sundays, for example.
Rail companies have more or less to beg them to do that, in spite of Sunday being one of the busiest days for train travel now that fewer people are commuting to offices every day.
Unions have managed to bid up pay over the years because rail companies have found it easier to satisfy their demands and go cap in hand to the government for higher subsidies.
Bizarrely, even though the industry — for now — is supposed to be privatised, it consumes far more taxpayers’ money than it ever did in British Rail’s day.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves could well be forced to follow her predecessor Denis Healey in having to fly off to the IMF to plead for a bailout
Ross Clark
In 2022/23 it received £11.9billion of subsidy, far more that the £9.2billion it earned from ticket sales.
The latest pay rises will almost certainly end up being funded by stinging the taxpayer for even bigger handouts, making a mockery of the Government’s promise to restore order to the public finances.
It isn’t just the train drivers’ pay award, either. Already, in its first six weeks in office, the Government has granted 5.5 per cent pay rises to teachers and NHS workers — more than three per cent above inflation.
Junior doctors have been awarded 22 per cent. GPs, who are demanding 11 per cent, will no doubt be next to be indulged.
And it won’t end there. Border Force workers at Heathrow have already called for strikes over the August Bank Holiday.
Now the Government has earned a reputation as a soft touch, all public sector unions will be back with ever more outrageous demands.
Stiff tax rises
This is all in the context of a public sector producing less and less for more and more money.
According to the Office for National Statistics, output per worker is lower now than when Tony Blair came to power 27 years ago.
Already, the Government seems to be losing control of public finances — and yet it has sought to blame the Conservatives for the “black hole” that it has itself created through excessive pay awards.
There will be stiff tax rises to come, but there is only so much punishment taxpayers can take.
And as Liz Truss showed, investors in government bonds are unforgiving when they lose faith in a country’s ability to repay its debts.
Once again, a Labour Government risks sailing towards the fiscal rocks.
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Chancellor Rachel Reeves could well be forced to follow her predecessor Denis Healey in having to fly off to the IMF to plead for a bailout.
She could at least save us a bit of money by booking her ticket early.