More a nuisance than a return to the bad old days

Is this to be the Summer of Discontent? Does today herald a rerun of the "Hell of '79"? The Tube shutdown comes on the heels of yesterday's council workers' strike, the first on this scale in 23 years. Forget the good weather and the holiday season. Without the Tube, London is crippled.

Trade union militancy is clearly back in vogue. Bob Crow, leader of the RMT Tube union, is no Islington Blairite. He is a classic canteen demagogue. The same goes for Mick Rix of the train drivers and Derek Simpson, about to topple Tony Blair's friend, Sir Ken Jackson, as leader of the engineers. Round at the TGWU, the statesmanlike Bill Morris is about to give way to the Left-wing Tony Woodley. In addition, today comes news that the TUC is threatening to cut its links with Labour and is demanding the biggest extension of workers' power in a generation.

The trade union old guard are already frightened. Those who have grown comfortable under Blairism, such as John Monks of the TUC and the General and Municipal's John Edmonds, are having to toe the strikers' line. Too bad if such archaic, 20th century behaviour sticks in their gullets. This is no time for a trade unionist to preach moderation or concern for public convenience. It is back to the barricades.

Yesterday, London's local government workers were fighting for money. Offered three per cent, which is above the rate of inflation, they are demanding six per cent. Mr Edmonds bases his claim not on comparability, but on many of his members being low paid. "The issue," he said yesterday, "is not percentage but low pay."

This may be politically correct, but it is not the point. Most of Mr Edmonds's striking members get above the Government's minimum wage. The poorest workers in London are in the private sector. They are cleaners, waiters, labourers and black economy workers struggling to keep the city alive in a twilit world beyond the reach of any union. Mr Edmonds's members have social entitlements, holidays, sick pay, pensions and security. They are not London's real poor.

Besides, the place to argue about low pay is before the Low Pay Commission. That argument should not have children sent home from school to penalise working parents or the streets left to fill with rubbish.

Mr Crow's Tube strike is a different matter. By no stretch of the imagination are his members low-paid. Their dispute is not about money, it's a political row with the Blair government over privatisation. Mr Crow knows that his demand for the Treasury's public-private partnership to be abandoned is not one that the management of London Underground is empowered to concede.

The union has fabricated a complaint about "inadequate consultation over safety", but that is code for muscle-flexing over privatisation. The union hopes that public anger will be directed not at its members but at Tony Blair. The strike is a crude political gesture.

Mr Crow has done well for his members. In collusion with Mr Rix of the drivers' union, Aslef, he has pushed train drivers swiftly up the pay scale to join the police as aristocrats of the public sector. Tube drivers get more than £30,000 a year basic. The perhaps more stressful job of bus driver still languishes below £18,000. Outside-London, Mr Crow has won his gains by playing private sector companies off against each other. In London he has exploited the shortage of recruits in the booming labour market.

Passengers may recall a cunning series of RMT strikes before the last General Election. It so rattled Mr Blair and his colleagues that they told London Underground, which they controlled, to concede big rises to Mr Crow for the sake of a quiet life. So much for a government committed to "no money without public-sector reform". Today's Tube strike continues that power struggle. It is an abuse of a labour monopoly.

So far so grim. But there is a huge difference between now and 1979. The bargaining power of most public-sector workers has been broken.

Half London's boroughs contract out their garbage collection and street-cleaning. Most of the strikers know that if they push their employers too far, councils will simply get someone else to do their jobs. The same goes for school cleaners, dinnerladies and grave-diggers.

White-collar, town-hall workers may be in a stronger position, but most people will not notice if benefit clerks or social workers go on strike. If trade unionists wish to punish the poor, it is on their consciences and not on that of the public.

Mr Blair is unlikely to lose much sleep over this week's events. Every focus group screams at him to "shift to centre-Right". He will not want to identify with the likes of Mr Crow, Mr Rix and Mr Edmonds.

Privatisation freed Mr Blair from much of the torment that afflicted Lord Callaghan in 1979, when he feebly told the union bosses that he was "prostrate before you". It might be to Mr Blair's advantage to proclaim, "Tough on strikes ... tough on the causes of strikes". An occasional dispute will even give the clich? some bite.

I doubt if London is in for a run of industrial disputes. Too much has changed. The public sector is not the monolith that it was. Union leaders may be more Left-wing but few, other than Mr Crow, wield much power and he is only an occasional pain in the neck. Come to that, his members on the Tube could soon be employed not by Mr Blair but by Ken Livingstone under the new arrangements for running the Underground.

So far, Citizen Ken has refused to condemn the Tube strike and failed to comment on the council workers' walkout.

Where is the Mayor?