Jayfor to Rev.

More than 24 hours of a Tube strike and London is still standing. I was half expecting the place to look like a ghost-town scene from an old western movie; cracked wooden buildings with saloon doors creaking at the hinges. The odd cow’s skull trampled into the dirt roads. But no. There are still G-Wizzes and Café Neros and parking metres. London still stands. But London is angry.

As British people, we often support and empathise with strike action. We love a worthy underdog. But to find any support for this strike, you would need to talk to a hell of a lot of Londoners. We hate an underdog that shits on our lawn and eats our children’s homework. The general feeling seems to be that this strike comes down to nothing but ham-fisted greed. And in troubled economic times which have been the product of greed, this goes down very, very badly. A glance at the numbers makes it pretty clear why a lot of people are very unhappy. Strikers are demanding a not insubstantial pay increase whilst the majority of Londoners take freezes, cuts or worse. The fact that there is no way it can be claimed that this pay increase is essential for securing a Tube worker’s minimum standard of living only adds fuel to the flames (a Tube driver earns almost double the UK’s average salary). The second is the call for a promise to hold all redundancies. No one wants to see anybody made redundant, but we all have over the past months and we all know that they are a part of business. The feeling that ‘I can’t be guaranteed that I won’t be made redundant. Why should they?’ seems quite natural. The final straw is the huge cost to the local economy (estimated at about £100 million) at a time when the local economy needs every penny it can get. Your job and my job depend on it. And I nearly forgot… the massive inconvenience on every single person in this city.

So I find myself wondering, what the good goddamn is Bob Crow thinking? Did he make a drunken bet that he could get face on tele within a week? Surely not. It looks like a ball of sausages. One possibility is that the strike is not about pay or redundancies or even greed at all. It could very well be political. Bob Crow’s desire for the nationalisation of the Underground is no secret. If he can cause havoc and disruption on a large enough scale he may be able to bully the government into nationalisation. The government will stop at nothing to avoid the words ‘havoc’ and ‘disruption’ being used to describe the 2012 Olympics.

But my major concern has nothing to do with the real reason behind the strike. I’m concerned with what this will do to public opinion and what will happen when the Tories eventually get elected into power. The Conservatives are not famous for their love of the Unions, and mass public disgust with one of them is a very good excuse to stamp on their power. Those Unions truly fighting for the safety and genuine wellbeing off their members could be left toothless. And this will fly under the radar. Tube strikes affect millions on a person level, whereas a strike at a local factory will cause no change to almost everybody’s regular day. Shame on you Bob Crow.