Strikes will plague the run-up to the general election
Tens of thousands of British Airways passengers whose travel plans this weekend have been thwarted are only the first victims of industrial unrest threatening to disrupt air, rail and road travel this Easter.
A strike by cabin crew will go ahead after talks between the airline and the Unite union collapsed yesterday. BA has grounded more than half its flights this weekend. Another four days of strikes are set to start next Saturday.
The strikes have transformed the run-up to the general election. David Cameron, the Conservative leader, will invoke Margaret Thatcher today as he moves to exploit public anger and say that the country is facing a “spring of discontent”.
Senior Cabinet ministers voiced dismay as Labour faced the prospect of launching its election campaign against a backdrop of travel disruption.
Despite the biggest contingency operation in BA’s history only one in three of its passengers is expected to be able to travel today and about 1,000 flights will be grounded over the whole weekend. The travel plans of 250,000 further passengers planning to travel from next weekend have been thrown into doubt by the second stoppage.
To compound the misery, railway signal workers announced that they had voted to strike in a dispute that could bring train travel to a standstill at Easter. Rail chiefs fear that the dispute may converge with a row with maintenance workers and white-collar staff to hit travel from April 1. Motoring organisations warned of significant congestion on the roads as a result.
After the breakdown of talks between BA and Unite, Gordon Brown repeated his call last night for the union to call off the strike by cabin crew. “The Prime Minister believes this strike is in no one’s interest and will cause unacceptable inconvenience to passengers,” No 10 said.
Mr Cameron will turn up the pressure on Mr Brown today, saying that the Prime Minister is terrified of losing Unite’s cash. He will cite Baroness Thatcher who “broke the stranglehold of the union barons” and say that he, too, is ready to take on “vested interests”.
“Margaret Thatcher’s Government was defined by taking the side of the people against the powerful, the vested interest — those whose survival depended on keeping things as they were,” Mr Cameron will say. “Take her union reforms — she recognised that as long there was a closed shop and no proper ballots, power would lie with the big union barons.”
One Labour strategist insisted last night that voters would “see through any attempt to play politics with industrial relations”. But Paul Richards, a new Labour activist, voiced publicly the private disquiet felt among some ministers. “It will be a calamity on a grand scale if the Labour Government is seen as the ‘strikers’ friend’,” he said.
Network Rail announced last night that it would meet the RMT and TSSA unions on Monday in an attempt to head off the rail disruption.
There was no such let-off for BA passengers. The union rejected a late deal tabled yesterday, which offered a four-year pay deal and the replacement of one in ten cabin crew members removed from BA flights last November. The deal also included a clause allowing BA to recruit new staff to a separate fleet of aircraft on lower pay and pensions and the right to negotiate independently with this new fleet.
Willie Walsh, the BA chief, urged the union to put the offer to its members, but Unite refused. Tony Woodley, the union’s joint general secretary, said: “I think it is an absolute disgrace and an insult to our people.”
He accused “hawks” on the BA board of undermining hopes of averting the strike. “I think it is a classic case of Mr Walsh, unfortunately being one of the hawks, was looking for a war with our members.”
Mr Walsh is seeking savings of £62 million from the cabin crew budget as BA faces a second consecutive year of losses. “There are no hawks in British Airways,” he said. “The only things that fly in British Airways are the aircraft and those aircraft will continue to fly.”