Simon Jenkins: Now Boris Johnson needs a plan to keep the Tube moving

The latest strike may have been suspended but the Mayor’s record in handling the Underground is dire

Threat averted: but Londoners will be living through the wars of Bob Crow’s succession for months (Picture: Getty)

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6 May 2014

Today’s third Tube strike against ticket office modernisation would have been a disaster for London. The policy of the company, London Underground, to wear the RMT union down by attrition appears to have worked, at least in the short term. The expectation that more drivers would trickle back to work was undermining union solidarity. Last week LU supplied roughly 50 per cent of its service and the evidence was that today would have seen more. The LU management deserves credit for standing firm. This aspect of modernisation can proceed.

That said, this is a dreadful way to run a booming, supposedly “global” modern city. While it is easy to blame the proximate cause, a union recklessly exploiting its market strength, blame should really attach to those responsible for the industry overall. It is the industry’s leadership that allows this to happen. Many London services have disputes. Few still go on strike. Politicians love to take credit when things go right — as with the London economy. They run a mile from trouble.

London’s Mayor, Boris Johnson, is now clearly questing after the leadership of the Tory party and thus of the country. Good luck to him —so long as he does not pretend he can run London and stand for Parliament at the same time. Either way, he will be judged on his only proper job, that of city Mayor. He has proved himself an inspired politician — unusually rising rather than declining in popularity in office. His record as mayor has been dire.

In particular, Johnson is boasting the need for limiting strikes on essential services. He wants at least 50 per cent of the vote of all workers before such costly stoppages. Fine, but where has he been for the six years this idea has been openly advocated? He has not mobilised his much-vaunted clout at Westminster on behalf of his travelling public. Now David Cameron can merely murmur that he might consider it after the next election. He clearly owes Johnson nothing.

The three principal jobs assigned to the Mayor by London’s constitution — police, transportation and city-wide planning — have been a shambles under both its incumbents. Last week’s strike — in effect a homage to the RMT’s late leader Bob Crow — was a crushing comment on Johnson’s custodianship of the Tube. It began with his typically opportunistic pledge in opposition to renege on Ken Livingstone’s ticket office closure programme, a pledge that has returned to haunt him.

In the short term, the Mayor may have been right not to pressurise LU to capitulate to the strike. But he succeeded to Livingstone’s legacy of a Tube and a union led by a king-sized ego, that of the late Bob Crow, practised in browbeating London’s governors into giving in to him over and again. Johnson has absolutely no strategy for dealing with this, and commuters have been victims of industrial action ever since.

In 1997 the new Labour government had intended to cut the RMT down to size by dividing up and privatising the Tube. It was to be split into separate companies “vertically and horizontally”, between trains and tracks and between different London Tube lines. It was Tony Blair out-Thatcherising Thatcher.

The plan was a classic of Treasury fantasy thinking, politically laundered through the fevered brain of the transport minister, John Prescott. It failed utterly. Billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money were spent rescuing Londoners from Whitehall’s idiocy. This was money to shareholders, accountants and lawyers that should have been spent improving the Tube.

In its place Johnson should have had a Plan B. This required a drastic modernisation of the Tube, reflecting innovations common in urban transit systems around the world. This meant driverless trains and modern signalling. It meant automated ticket halls with staff on hand to help customers on the concourse. It meant forward planning, what Johnson’s heroine, Margaret Thatcher, would have had in her back pocket.

Johnson thought instead that he could wing it. As with the now desperate Metropolitan Police, he left the Tube to others to run, concentrating on glamour mega-projects paid for by the taxpayer. He took credit for Crossrail, free bikes, a Docklands cable car and hop-on-off buses (which you cannot hop on or off). As for the RMT, he thought a mix of wit and acerbic rhetoric would get the better of Crow. He thought cocky would trump cockney.

Johnson’s approach worked no better than Prescott’s. Crow did not give an inch, becoming one of the most authentic, unscrupulous and successful trade unionist of his generation. He exploited the market power given him by the Tube’s weak political leadership and by his monopoly hold on the travelling public.

Crow was rarely stupid. It is hard to believe he would have taken his members to the brink yesterday and then backed down. But Londoners are living through the wars of Crow’s succession. Lesser men must struggle to mimic his militancy with little of his tactical skill. That they can do this so easily is the measure of Johnson’s failure.

That hundreds of millions of pounds should have been sucked from the capital’s economy for the sake of £50 million a year in savings in ticket halls and no compulsory job losses is absurd. This is not the closure of an industry or even a firm. It is a straightforward display of union posturing.

The Tube is a booming business. Journeys have risen by almost a third in the past decade alone. Investment in new and existing lines is huge compared to what is available to the rest of Britain. No transport worker need fear obsolescence or redundancy. All that the Tube requires to keep exorbitant fares at a reasonable level is modernisation. That at least can now proceed.

Simon Jenkins: Now Boris Johnson needs a plan to keep the Tube moving

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