In an act of breathtaking audacity, just two days after being awarded a backdated pay rise of nearly 15 per cent, train drivers yesterday announced new strikes.
They will walk out over 11 weekends from the end of this month, said Mick Whelan, the general secretary of drivers’ union Aslef, who – as it happens – also sits on Labour’s National Executive Committee.
He attempted to justify the walkouts by accusing train operator LNER, which is run by the Government, of ‘boorish behaviour and bullying tactics’.
Perhaps Mr Whelan could have a word with his Labour mates – including Transport Secretary Louise Haigh – to smooth out any issues, rather than launching yet another salvo against the travelling public.
Adding to the growing sense of chaos, the RMT is demanding a ‘parallel, synchronised’ deal, health unions are thinking about asking for upgraded offers for hundreds of thousands of NHS workers, and Border Force workers have now announced a swathe of strikes.
The unions were always going to demand payback from their Labour comrades.
But even cynics could not have expected the new Government to have lost control of the militant unions after just a few weeks.
Whitehall’s WFH fibs
THE Civil Service has again been caught in an act of chicanery that would make Sir Humphrey blush.
Government mandarins have, since 2022, published figures on employee attendance and it was reasonable to assume that these measured the proportion of civil servants actually turning up at their Whitehall offices each morning.
But, as this newspaper reveals today, all was not as it seemed.
Right across government, the official figures simply counted the number of occupied desks instead.
So, in a department with 1,000 staff but only 500 desks, the data would trumpet a 100 per cent occupancy rate if 500 people clocked into the office.
It is a sleight of hand symptomatic of a deep malaise in the Civil Service which deploys duplicity, omission and obfuscation on a daily basis.
We see information withheld simply on ‘operational grounds’ or even in the name of ‘national security’. Perhaps a positive gloss is put on the latest monumental disaster through the disclosure of only some of the facts. Or the gathering of data is slightly changed from year to year, so it is impossible to understand how performance in a particular area is changing over time.
All of that said, the issue at the heart of this story is how many staff are working from home and how often – leading to legitimate questions about how this may affect productivity.
We should expect honesty and transparency from the Civil Service about its fitness to tackle the jobs at hand – and ministers should demand the same.
Tony Blair famously vowed that New Labour would be free of scandal and ‘whiter than white’.
Any attempt by Sir Keir Starmer to sing from the same song sheet is already being compromised by questions over whether his chief of staff Sue Gray was behind two cases of alleged cronyism.
The allegations of ‘cash for jobs’ would have caused howls of protest from Labour if they had occurred under Boris Johnson.
Now they are in power Labour leaders, too, must expect the unblinking eye of scrutiny to fall upon them.