Mystery Trains
Why the Government Wants us to Re-Live the Seventies...Forever
In the 2006 hit BBC series Life on Mars, Detective Chief Inspector Sam Tyler, played by John Simms, is mysteriously transported back to 1973 Manchester, where he finds that he has dropped a rank and is obliged to work under the command of hardcore copper DCI Gene Hunt, memorably played by Philip Glenister.
How has Tyler ended up in this predicament? He doesn’t know, and for most of the series neither do we, but the clash of anachronisms - laced with nostalgia - that ensues is part of the attraction of the series. The seventies also occupies a special place in Tory mythology. Again and again Tory politicians and their supporters return to it, for reasons that have nothing to do with entertainment.
In 2013 David Cameron told the Conservative Party conference, in reference to Ed Miliband, ‘We’ll leave the 1970s-style socialism to others; we are the party of the future’, while Boris Johnson warned the same conference against a ‘1970s blend of divisiveness and business-bashing and union control’.
Four years later, the Mail accused Labour of ‘plans to take Britain back to the 1970s’ with its proposals to renationalise railways, scrap strike laws and carry out a ‘£6bn tax raid’ (the horror). And in 2019, the odious self-regarding fanatic Ann Widdicombe accused Labour of ‘a return to the 70s and the politics of envy’ in response to a Labour conference vote in favour of abolishing charitable status for public schools.
Nostalgia is always conspicuously absent from the Tory evocation of a decade mired in chaos and perpetual crisis, from which the country was only rescued by…the Tory Party.
In the Tory version of Life on Mars, as endlessly available as a Britbox classic, the seventies is a grim ‘lesson from history’, a dark abyss filled with unemployment queues, three day weeks, strikes, and blackouts, where even gravediggers go on strike and ‘union barons’ turn up for the dreaded ‘tea and sandwiches’ at Downing Street.
All this, we are told, was entirely due to the Labour Party, and this vision of the seventies is obsessively presented and re-presented as a nightmarish vision of the possible future, even to those who were too young even to remember the years in which a necrophiliac DJ presented Top of the Pops, when T Rex’s Get it On topped the charts, and the NUM’s Joe Gormley gave press statements outside Downing Street.
Deja Vu All Over Again
Given these precedents, no one can be surprised that the seventies have been dragged out of the Central Office cutting room once again by Tory politicians and their supporters, in response to the rolling strikes called by the Rail, Maritime and Transport union (RMT). Thus on Tuesday, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps told LBC that the strikes had been called ‘under false pretences’ by the ‘1970s union baron boss’ Mick Lynch.
In the Telegraph, Tim Stanley claimed that ‘the RMT abandoned negotiations and triggered a summer of discontent, forcing us onto a slow-moving train back to the seventies.’ Naturally the Daily Mail joined in the retro-narrative, by referencing the old Saatchi & Saatchi slogan that once worked so well for Margaret Thatcher in the 1979 General Election:
The idea that the RMT’s strikes are due to Labour might seem a little incongruous to those of us who recall that Labour has not been in power for nearly thirty years and that the RMT is not affiliated to the Labour Party, but that has not stopped Tory MPs from characterising them as ‘Labour’s strikes’:
And Oliver ‘Wokeboy Slim’ Dowden - another Tory stranger to truth and common sense - also got his populist ten cents in, as is only to be expected:
You don’t need to be Lynton Crosby to understand what all these ‘back to the future’ accusations are intended to achieve. This is a government with its back very much to the wall. It staggers on from one scandal to the next, beset by multiple crises - some of which are due to its own actions - and it has no idea how to mitigate, let alone solve them.
It’s a government constantly seeking distractions from its leader’s moral failings, facing two by-elections in the same week that might hasten Johnson’s political demise. In these circumstances, it makes a kind of morbid cynical sense to reel back the years once again and tar Keir Starmer and the Labour Party with the seventies brush.
Is the strategy working? The evidence suggests not, at least not yet. On Monday a Savanta Comres poll found that 58 percent of those questioned thought the strikes were justified, while 66 percent believed the government had not done enough to prevent them. A separate YouGov poll found that 37 percent were ‘supportive’ of the strikes and another 45 percent were ‘opposed.’
Over the last two days, The RMT general secretary Mick Lynch has been praised across social media for his devastatingly effective unravelling of the dismal Tory politicians and media commentators echoing government talking points, who we have all had to endure - mostly unchallenged - for too many years now.
Beyond its own short-term interests, the government appears to be doing what Tory governments have always done: place the burden of the crisis on those least able to carry it, and present any form of collective action as a ‘winter of discontent redux’, in which ‘militant’ strikers are always victimising ‘the taxpayer’ and ‘harming the people they claim to represent.’
Last week Johnson told ‘our hard-working public sector workers’ to accept real-terms pay cuts if the country was to avoid a wage-price spiral - a possibility that Treasury Minister Simon Clarke described as ‘a repeat of the 1970s.’
But the RMT’s demand of a 7 percent pay rise is clearly not ‘inflation-busting’, even assuming that the ‘wage price spiral’ thesis is correct. Inflation is currently at just over nine percent and heading for 11 percent in the autumn. As Mick Lynch has pointed out, RMT members have not had a pay rise in three years, yet still the 1970s-era spectre of ‘greedy’ unions has been presented to the public by Tory politicians and the Tory press like Halloween monsters.
Though Tory propagandists have depicted the strike as a gratuitous money-grab by well-paid train drivers, the strikers include out-sourced cleaners and maintenance staff, train dispatchers, some of whom are homeless and working in bus shelters, even though they are being paid between £25k-£31k.
Yesterday the RMT accused Grant Shapps of ‘wrecking’ negotiations by refusing to allow Network Rail to withdraw a threat of redundancy for 2, 900 of its members. Shapps dismissed this claim as a ‘total lie’, saying that the government has no involvement in the letter or in the negotiations. But Network Rail is a non-departmental public body (NDPB) of the Department of Transport.
The government not only provides a direct grant to Network Rail; it also subsides privately-owned train companies in the UK, so it has leverage that it could bring to bear. According to the BBC the train handling companies’ handling of strike action is ‘subject to the secretary of state’s direction.’
Given the government’s well-established track record of dishonesty and misinformation, it is difficult to believe Shapps, or any other member of the cabinet when they say there is nothing the government can do about the strikes.
Its priorities in this crisis appear, like almost everything it does, to be entirely determined by calculations as to what it can gain from them politically, and also by how it can use the strikes to help Boris Johnson survive a little longer.
But behind these short-term calculations, there is more at stake. The UK currently faces a ‘cost of living crisis’ that is going to get worse, in which millions of people are getting poorer and forced to choose between eating and heating their homes.
It is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid the fact that some of this is due to Brexit, and that Brexit has hampered our ability to respond to the crisis. The government cannot admit any of this without paving the way for its own downfall. Even when airline companies blame passenger chaos on Brexit, Shapps has nothing to say, except that he has ordered airlines to come up with a reduced schedule for the summer.
In short, this is a government careering on the road to nowhere. It can’t tell the truth about anything, because the truth might destroy it, and so it clings on, reaching for one wedge issue after another, sending out its glazed procession of hollow men and women out into the tv studios to lie and twist the truth.
Mick Lynch, on the other hand, speaks with the confidence of a man who knows he represents a just cause. He has the support of 89 percent of the more than 70 percent of those who voted to come out on strike. He knows that the RMT workers face the same plight as other ‘hero workers’ – praised during the pandemic and then effectively abandoned by the government, and forced to work on salaries that have dramatically reduced by inflation and price rises.
There are many more where they came from, and some of them are already talking about taking strike action. The government knows this, and that is why it wants us to revisit the seventies and forget that we are living in 2022.
‘I had an accident and I woke up in 1973,’ says Sam Tyler in Life on Mars, ‘ I had no idea if I was mad, or if I was in a coma, or if I'd gone back in time. It was like I'd woken up on a different planet. But I knew that if I could find out the reason, that I could get home.’
We also need to get back home, and make our national home worth living in and living for. We need to wake up from the trance that the Tory party has put us in. We need to find our way to a future where foodbanks are not necessary, either for people on benefits or for people who work but still can’t afford to feed their families.
We need a country where the idea of justice can become a guiding principle in our politics once again, and where the workers who helped us get through the pandemic achieve a just reward. To achieve that outcome, we need trade unions that can do what they have always tried to do – defend and protect their members, even if that sometimes means taking strike action.
And that is why we should reject once and for all the Tory version of the seventies, and take the present as our starting point as we look towards the future, by supporting these strikes and the ones that may come after them.