A foolish strike

A foolish strike
Reading the euro runes

The New Year has begun with a depressing ring of familiarity: misery for hundreds of thousands of London commuters caused by a pointless strike on suburban rail routes. The RMT union, with its customary arrogance and contempt for the public, gave just five hours warning of a strike that started yesterday and will cripple services into Waterloo until the middle of next week.

Even by the standards of the antediluvian RMT, which last year went on strike over the colour of waistcoats worn by train guards and repeatedly threatened chaos on the Tube, this dispute is entirely unjustified. Officially the latest action is part of a straightforward pay claim; the union wants the same 7.6 per cent wage increase obtained last year for the 600 drivers on South West Trains to apply to all other grades, such as ticket collectors and guards.

The company accepts the case in principle but is haggling over the details. It is highly irresponsible to call a damaging strike, and hold passengers as pawns, over such relatively trivial matters - particularly as the union has already won for all its members at SWT a generous deal on shorter working hours that would be the envy of workers in most other industries. The other cause of the strike is still more unreasonable. The RMT leadership is using union members to defend the position of one its hardline ringleaders, Greg Tucker, who faces demotion from train driver to ticket collector following a safety-related incident believed to involve a speeding train.

At a time when the public is rightly concerned about railway safety, it is grotesque that the union should be protecting a driver who faces disciplinary action on these grounds. Mr Tucker represents all that is wrong with the RMT. An unreconstructed figure of the hard left, and a fanatical supporter of Arthur Scargill's Socialist Alliance, he was ejected from the Labour Party some years ago. He, along with several other RMT leaders, is a throwback to the trade unionism of the 1970s - an era that must never return. If we are ever to see a modern railway service in this country, sooner or later there will have to be a showdown with the mindless militants of the RMT.

Reading the euro runes

Two days ago, Foreign Office minister Mr Peter Hain caused an upset in the dovecots by asserting that it would eventually prove impossible for Britain to stay out of the euro. For this "indiscretion" he was apparently slapped down by his boss the Foreign Secretary. But then, yesterday, the MP for Hartlepool wrote a weighty piece in the Financial Times, speaking well of the euro. Hartlepool? Who cares? Well, of course, it's not the Hartlepool bit that counts, but the fact that the MP in question is Mr Peter Mandelson.

Mr Mandelson is temporarily retired from the front ranks of politics after revealing moral flaws of the kind that normally disqualify people from becoming bookmakers' runners or pianists in brothels. But the Prime Minister still finds Mr Mandelson's counsels irresistible, perhaps for this reason. So when Hartlepool speaks, the body politic listens, because it believes it is hearing a voice influential in Downing Street.

Today, moreover, there are two new twists to this saga. First, Treasury mogul Mr Gus O'Donnell made the front pages by stating to a seminar what everyone knew already as a matter of common sense - that a decision to join the euro will ultimately be political rather than economic, that the famous "five tests" can be read in as many ways as crime figures.

Finally, of course, on his flight to the safety of India Mr Blair himself asserts that we must recognise the euro as a reality, and cannot ignore it. What does it all add up to? That there is still everything to play for. That Mr Blair would like to join the euro in this Parliament, while Mr Gordon Brown would rather delay a while, to avoid risking his own chances of becoming Prime Minister. That we shall almost certainly join the euro in the next decade, but under this politically cautious Government, more likely in the next Parliament than this one.