Any other business

Lenin and Sid Waddell provide words to describe the leader of the Tube strike

15 September 2007

Don’t mind me asking,’ a Geordie lad accosted me on the train, ‘but aren’t you Sid Waddell?’ I looked blank.

I have followed Crow’s career — at a safe distance — ever since he became the London Underground representative on the national executive of the newly merged Rail, Maritime and Transport union in the early Nineties. In 1994, when I was writing here about London Transport’s aspiration to create a ‘Decently Modern Metro’ by 2007 (wonder what happened to that?), a senior LT executive whispered to me that he had spotted a bust of Lenin on Crow’s desk. A card-carrying communist until he softened up and joined Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party in 1997, he’s the most recognisable of the ‘awkward squad’ of left-wing union leaders. The others, however, are cleverer and more ambitious: like Paul Kenney of the GMB, scourge of private equity, they use smart PR to make their arguments; like Tony Woodley of the T&G, they are seen at the negotiating table when the fate of companies such as MG Rover is decided; they’re all eager to do deals with Gordon Brown, however tough he says he’s going to be on public-sector pay deals. But Bob just wants to smash capitalism. He reminds us why it’s vital that inflation is never allowed to let rip again, so that we never return to the strike-driven wage spiral of the Seventies; why it’s so important that managers nurture positive, direct relationships with their workers, leaving no space for union militants whose real agenda is subversion. To adopt a phrase attributed to Lenin, Bob is a useful idiot. After the public hostility and scorn poured on Bob last week for his pointlessly damaging Tube strike — to adopt a phrase attributed to Sid Waddell — he must be ‘as happy as a penguin in a microwave’.

A parable of panic selling