Bob Crow is dead

Kevin

You raise two interesting points :-

1.   Will his successor be a bolshie and will he cause trouble

2.   The financing of the tube.

Dim witted bolshies who put their politics before the pragmatism of their industries tend to end up in trouble.  Take the mining industry as an example.  Joe Gormley was succeeded by Arthur Scargill as President of the MUM.  Gormley was quiet man, he had a brain, was a brilliant negotiator and got the Miners several inflation busting pay deals.  Scargill was an attention seeking loud mouth who was a lousy tactician.  He started the Miners strike at the wrong time in the spring, he did not ballot for a strike and the strike was destined to fail from the day it started. He just thought that by going on and on, the coal would run out and he would win.  His aims were to force the Tories out as well as securing a pay rise.

Unfortunately he screwed up because we had coal stock piled everywhere and the public were sick of annual power cuts.  Scargill is probably the main reason why the Mining industry is all but dead. The government switched to other forms of energy and imported cheaper coal. Scargill did everything wrong.

I suspect that the outcome would have been different had Gormley been in charge.

As regards to your second point, you fund the tube by fares and local taxation. If London wants cheap fares, they can cough up the tax. If they want to reduce taxation, the passengers can pay the full fare themselves. There is no reason why a tax payer from say Wigan should have to subsidize London commuters.

Regards

Mick

Mick, I agree about Scargill. Had the NUM - at the time the most powerful union in the country - had a more astute, less bull-headed and egotistical leader, we'd still have a coal industry, and be better off for it. UK coal is some of the very finest in the world and the Chinese and others would be willing to pay a hefty premium for it. Now that they have lain idle for two decades, it would cost billions to get some of those deep mines working again.

Sadly Scargill and his acolytes foolishly walked straight into the trap Thatch and McGregor astutely laid for them. The shock troops of the old working class were destroyed and the neo-liberal project beloved of Thatcher, Blair and the Austrian school was underway. We are living with its consequences today, which will be a source of sorrow and despair to anyone who'd rather our country wasn't sold off to various crony capitalists and other lawless ne'er do wells.

Who the RMT elect as their next leader, I don't know. There are no standout candidates I can see. But they will be extremely unwilling to give up the gains made in the Crow era.

On the subject of Tube funding, I wasn't suggesting that the good folk of Wigan pay for it; but CitiBank, JP Morgan, Barclays and HSBC employ 50,000+ people in Canary Wharf alone. Surely a small levy payable by these kind of companies, perhaps based on London head count, would help pay for the efficient London transport system upon which their prosperity depends (and no, moving out of London is not an option for most of them, so we, nor the Mayor, shouldn't listen to threats that they would do so).

I suspect BC would agree with the second part of this but I think he was also a pragmatist who knew he could not influence matters such a tube-funding so stuck to the things he could influence i.e. getting his members a good deal.  Some other left-leaning unionists and lobbyists might do well to learn from this.  In other words, put your energies into the things where you can make a real difference and don't rage against the wind.   

I was sad to hear of his untimely death.

I was a not a fan of his politics, or the way he would threaten to cause chaos in London to get wages for the staff that are way above the norm. The drivers have a responsible job. But they have two choices GO and STOP. Hardly an Airline Pilot.

What always got my blood pressure high was his attitude to his entitlelment to SOCIAL HOUSING. Now here we have a BIG WIG on a very high salary living in SOCIAL HOUSING. he would say it was HIS COUNCIL HOUSE. Actually it was NOT HIS. The other aspect of this is that he was occupying a Council House for which there were more needy families in his area who would benefit from that house. He was well able on his salary to provide for his own housing needs. it was his Political view of housing that meant he felt entitled to live in that house till he died.

The hypocrisy of hating the rich in their posh houses and the reality of him being in the top 1% of UK salaries and living in Social Housing always galled me.

Still 52 is no age to depart this mortal coil.

His Vitriol when Margaret Thatcher died was bordering on the obscene. So I do not doubt that there are many who will be of a similar mind at his parting.

I do support him on driverless trains though.

Train drivers earn £40k + a year, a job i feel sure most people with a few brain cells could learn in a week. So who suffers ? not your high paid city types but your low paid(£7 per hour etc) who have to use the train service to get to and from work.

Mista H

The real scandal is that most of London's social housing stock was sold off on the cheap by Mrs Thatch and never replaced. The Major, Blair, Brown and Cameron governments have done nothing to change this.

One of the reasons London has a desperate housing crisis. Crow didn't cause it, save your vitriol for those really responsible.

That's hardly the train drivers', or the station staff's fault, is it? They deserve £40K a year more than a merchant banker deserves £1m-plus. At least the drivers are doing something useful.

People using capital letters look a bit bonkers to me. As a union leader, he couldn't win on this point. Move to a posh house and you're out of touch with your members. Stay in the social housing and you're blocking someone else. What to do?

Surely driving something that's worth millions, and contains hundreds of people, warrants £40,000 a year? 

Plus one gazillion.

Bus drivers earn a lot less than £40k a year,as do coach drivers. Which is the most stressfull,you tell me driving a London bus or train !! Coming back from cardiff last Saturday a few of us got talking to the 2nd coach driver(you need 2 on longer trips) we got talking money/hours worked. He was up at 5,into work,pick up the coach,picked us up at the training ground,drive to cardiff & back,back to the depot in kent,then they have to clean the coach,then home late. More than likely knackered,all for £82 a day. That to me is joke money.

Mista H

The buses are privatised Mista. They are poorly unionised. Had they an RMT or a Crowe they might be better off. The bus drivers' poor pay and conditions are the fault of their employers, not the Tube drivers.

Hear, hear.

steve

Yes, it's not the fault of tube drivers that coach and bus drivers are paid considerably less.  And this illustrates rather well the habit we in the UK seem to have of inclining to level down rather than up.  There was a flavour of this in the other thread on pensions where, because the value of provision of some pensions in the private sector have fallen significantly in recent years (for a variety of reasons), the inclination has been to criticise pensions in the public sector, implying that those should fall in-line too.  Why do we do this?   

Sounds to me like your buying a season ticket at Milwall next season !!

Mista h

Chaps

I think nearly everyone agrees that Bob Crow was an exceptional union negotiator and deserves respect for achieving the conditions he secured for his members.

As regards to him living in a council house, so what. He lived there most of his life and probably bought it twice over in the rent he paid and it still belongs to the council.  Also bear in mind that as an high income earner, he must have paid a large amount of tax, so he did his bit for society.

His politics were bloody awful but he was still a decent human being.

Regards

Mick

Well said Mick.

Mick imagine if you will that you are on the Council Housing waiting list and you know that somebody in full time work on a salary of 150k per annum is enjoying living in a Council House!

he was on a good salary and could well afford to buy his own home.

He felt entitled to that house and said so on many occasions.

Also I would add that in many country's today the metro rail system are driverless trains. So No real need for a driver. But I would prefer to have a driver just in case the 1 in 1000000 happens. But many automated driverless trains run safely and efficiently.

David

David

You raise two points

1. Well paid people living in council houses.

I see nothing wrong with a well paid person living in a council house as long as they live in it and do not sub let.  A well paid person will look after the house, probably spend money on the garden and generally help to keep the area "nice".  No matter where we live, we have the same amount of people trying to live in the same amount of houses, who lives where is largely academic.  If you think high earners should be forced out of a council house, surely the sensible thing to do is to step up the rent by making it income related. That way the local council gets the additional income.

2.  Driverless trains.

I agree that even if there is only a one in a million chance of something happening, the stakes are still to high and every train should have a driver who has been medically fit and checked daily for booze and drugs.

Regards

Mick

Many countries do have driverless rains on their metro systems, that is true. But none of them has a metro system that is 150 years old, nor one as complex as London's. Driverless trains will not happen - it would probably be seen as a cut too far and would constitute political suicide for whoever tried to force it through.

Your beefs about Bob's council house are completely irrelevant, as Mick says. I think you're just desperately casting around for some sort of stick to beat him with. In which case, I fear you may have to find a sturdier stick.

If I were on a council waiting list, rather than whingeing about Crow I would be far angrier about:

1. The selling-off of social housing stock on the cheap in the 1980s
2. The failure by successive governments (and local authorities) to replace the lost stock
3. The failure to build houses generally
4. Poor planning policy
5. The huge number of empty properties in London and other large cities