Mick Lynch in his own words
4th August 2022, on the channel “Double Down News”.
[Extracts]
“Division is fatal for working class people, we cannot allow that to happen, all workers are one and that’s the attitude we have to take forward, mobilising our people together, all workers of every identity in one mass movement.
The cost of living crisis is one of the most significant thing we’ve had; by the end of the year we could have ordinary working class families paying £500 a month for energy bills; that’s phenomenal and it’s unforgivable that a government could allow that to happen while the distribution companies, BP, Shell, the privatised gas companies are making phenomenal profits, 37 billion while working people, even people with reasonable salaries are starting to struggle just to get by week by week.
The very idea of public ownership itself, by the people for the people, is an idea that the trade unions and the labour movement have got to put forward.
We’ve got a railway system that’s completely confused in this country, with a mixture of owners. The majority of these owners are actually European states, the French, Dutch, Spanish and German railways, they take the profits and go and subsidise the railways in Europe.
There are true private sector operators such as First Group, Go-Ahead and others. Last year they took £500 million out of the railway from subsidies by the government; at the same time they put the fares up and said to railway workers ‘you can’t have a pay rise for two or three years and you may lose your job and you’ve got to chop up all your conditions.’
If we had a public sector railway system that was owned by the people we could concentrate on making the railway the centre piece of an integrated transport policy that linked up the buses, the trams, the ferries we’ve got around our coasts; this could all be linked up in a low cost, carbon-free system. We could have a great vision for the future if the public transport was in public ownership, at the service of our people, and at the service of our environment, which we all know we need to change as an emergency item. Being in public hands is a fundamental of a progressive society.
Transport for the people, not for profit.
What we’ve got to remember is that trade unions exist in every society, They’re almost an organic development, and if you look at where we’ve progressed we have regulation;
Safety regimes were brought in through union action, the very idea of the weekend is a trade union idea, public holiday, sick pay, holiday pay, pensions, statutory education for our children, and then the jewel in the crown of course is the National Health Service. All of that stems from the trade union movement and we can’t afford to lose it.
People need to join a union because it’s your hope and it’s your strength. … We need to make sure that the unions themselves put their flag and their identity into working class communities, not just in the workplace but in the working class housing estates and the streets of Britain. The trade unions have got to show the unorganised how to organise, they’ve got to show people who have given up that there is hope, that they can organise and build.
At the minute Starmer and the front bench of the Labour Party seem to be pulling to the right, as the Tories get pulled to the right in the leadership campaign.
Working people have got to be with the unions and with other activists and campaigners, no matter what their background or identity is, working together to pull all this back to our side so that we have a real community based working class movement that stands for our rights and our positions and politicians will have to follow us if we get our act together.”
Mick Lynch supports the Youtube Channel ‘Double Down News’.
He is also present in the campaign group ‘Enough is Enough’ https://wesayenough.co.uk
alongside Dave Ward, Eddie Dempsey, Zarah Sultana and others.
Labour Affairs 