Once again, ladies and gentlemen, the capital is in the grip of industrial mayhem. Five days of Tube strikes, a paralysed Underground, and Londoners crammed like sardines on buses and bikes.
The culprits? The militant barons of the RMT, wagging their fingers and waving their demands: a four-day week on full pay and a 75 per cent discount on train journeys nationwide, as if free travel across London for themselves and their families weren’t already enough.
And what does Labour do? Exactly what they’ve always done: cave in, capitulate, kowtow. Every time. The party of supposed modernisation has become little more than a vending machine for union bosses: shake it hard enough and out pops another taxpayer-funded sweetener. The result? More strikes. More chaos. And more emboldened unions who know they can bring Britain’s beating heart to a standstill and walk away with the spoils.
Let’s be blunt. Tube drivers already earn an average of £72,849 per year. That’s more than doctors starting out, more than engineers who keep planes aloft or coders building our future. For what? For sitting in the cab of a train that, in truth, already drives itself along vast stretches of track. This is not coal-mining in 1910. This is not back-breaking labour in the dark. Yet they’re demanding fewer hours, richer perks, and a taxpayer pick-up for their leisure trips to Brighton.
It is absurd. It is insulting. And it is a national embarrassment.
A serious country cannot be hijacked, again and again, by a small group of workers who treat the public purse as their personal piggy bank. Londoners are paying the price, with their time, their wallets, and their sanity, while Labour clings to its 1970s playbook of bowing to union bosses.
Enough.
Never forger, unions have a grim habit of repeating history: they push, and push, and push until the very industry that feeds them collapses under the weight of their demands. Time and again, instead of working with modernisation, they resist it, demanding ever-higher pay, shorter hours, and perks that no business could dream of sustaining. And the result? Technology overtakes them, jobs vanish, and Britain becomes uncompetitive. Just look at our steel industry: once the pride of the world, now a shadow of itself, shuttered plants, lost livelihoods, and communities hollowed out. Not because the world stopped needing steel, but because endless strikes and unrealistic demands made British steel more expensive and less reliable, driving business elsewhere. The unions always promise they’re fighting to protect jobs, but in truth, they often destroy them.
The solution is staring us in the face, gleaming like a Tesla in a row of sputtering old bangers: driverless trains. If British engineers can help the Americans land rockets upright on barges in the Atlantic, we can certainly get a Tube from Euston to Oxford Circus without a driver sulking about their shift pattern. The technology exists. The Docklands Light Railway has been running without drivers for decades. Paris is rolling it out across its Metro. London, supposedly a global city, lags behind, shackled to the whims of militant unions because politicians lack the courage to say: “No more.”
Driverless trains don’t go on strike. They don’t demand gold-plated pensions, nor a four-day week for five days’ pay. They don’t hold commuters hostage to push through unaffordable perks. They simply run… reliably, safely, efficiently.
Labour’s failure to stand firm means one thing is guaranteed: today it’s the Tube, tomorrow it will be buses, then trams, then airports, then who knows what else. Every cave-in feeds the next demand. This is not governing. It is surrender.
Londoners deserve better than to be pawns in the unions’ game of brinkmanship. They deserve a transport system that works for the public, not for a clique of well-paid drivers with an inflated sense of entitlement.
It’s high time we moved beyond this theatre of the absurd. Let Labour cling to their union barons if they wish. The rest of us should demand a twenty-first century solution: driverless trains, unshackled from strikes, delivering London into the modern age.
Because the truth is simple: the future doesn’t strike.
Sky news uses graphs from bloomberg to show how bad the economy is in France- Economic crisis in France goes beyond it’s overspending problem. Of course France is a full member of the EU and is still being forced to pay billions of euros just for the EU to make their economy worse. Yet more proof that the UK was right to Leave the EU.