Hard left on track for RMT

Hard-left rail strike leader Bob Crow will tonight - barring a last minute upset - be declared general secretary of the RMT, largest of the rail unions.

The election of Mr Crow, who helped organise strikes on South West Trains and elsewhere in the country, will signal even harder bargaining with train companies and encourage the hard-Left to campaign for two senior union posts still up for grabs.

Vernon Hince, who took over as acting general secretary after the death of Jimmy Knapp last year, is expected to retire next month.

Mr Crow's first command will be to put the union "on a more professional basis". Rail company chiefs will fear that as a clearing of the decks for future action. He will boost staffing at the RMT's Euston headquarters and its regional offices. Senior officials will be linked via the internet in a £250,000 package designed by Mr Crow - even though he confesses to being computer-illiterate.

The RMT, once tens of millions of pounds in the red, now has a healthy bank balance to finance its battles and Mr Crow has never shirked from using industrial muscle to obtain better pay and working conditions.

The 42-year-old, who joined a Tube strike the day after returning from his honeymoon in 1982, pledges to continue "total opposition" to part-privatisation of the Tube, and to campaign for rail renationalisation.

He bridles at being called, in the word of Tony Blair, a "wrecker" opposed to public service reforms: "I am not a wrecker and neither are my members. Since I was 16 I have been helping to construct the railway, not wreck it," he said. "If I win I will be a track-suited general secretary. I am not into stuffy suits. I will be out there getting it in the ear from my members."

The stocky east Londoner was the RMT's assistant general secretary for eight years, and his roots are as a Tube track worker - he joined the industry at 16. An avid Millwall fan, he is also proud he went to the same school as Spurs star Jimmy Greaves.

Not a member of any political party - he was once in the Communist Party of Great Britain - Mr Crow said the RMT's Labour Party affiliation will continue. But of Labour MPs such as John Prescott and Frank Dobson who have refused to join RMT campaigns, he said: "If they won't support us we will look for others who will."