An overweight, Millwall-supporting skinhead, Bob Crow is a hard man to love at the best of times. When he and his RMT union colleagues shut down the London underground, as has happened for the past two days, he effortlessly becomes the most hated man in London. And nobody hates him more than the Times: yesterday, the first day of the latest tube strike, it ran not one but two anti-Crow diatribes.
The Times's view seems to be that, at a time when people all over the UK are losing their jobs, or taking pay cuts to preserve them, the RMT has no right to ask for more money or to insist that there should be no compulsory redundancies. I can't say I understand this logic at all: because the workers at LDV Vans have lost their jobs, Crow and his union are supposed to be more willing to allow their own members to get laid off? Crow's a militant trade unionist: that's not how he thinks. His job is to defend the interests of his members in bad times as well as good.
It's interesting that the Times is only looking for behaviour modification on the union side. I haven't seen any editorials calling for, oh, I don't know, Rupert Murdoch to rein in his capitalist predations in order to serve the general good. In fact, Murdoch is in the process of sinking one of his UK competitors, Setanta, at this very moment, without a whiff of hostility from the Times.
The Times's most ludicrous suggestion was that RMT members would serve their own interests best by getting rid of Crow. Oh yeah, ditch the guy whose efforts have won tube drivers £40,000 a year wages -- that'll happen for sure.
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