Look at the timing and the detail of Tube strike

Published: 30th December, 2010

• ON Boxing Day the strike by Aslef, RMT and the TSSA deprived London’s struggling retail industry of some much-needed cash.

It pushed shopping from the high street, where employees have a degree of union representation, to the on-line stores, wherein unions have no influence whatsoever.

One of the pretexts for this industrial action was the impending closure of a number of ticket offices in Tube stations with extremely low usage; so low that those offices are not economical to keep running.

It could be that the union leaders are genuinely convinced that should the ticket office in Parsons Green be closed, the repercussions would be such to endanger the future of London’s entire network, and that the ticket office in Sudbury Hill is all that is preventing our essential transport services from grinding to a permanent halt.

But the devil is in the detail and timing is critical. This decision to close the offices has been attributed to Boris Johnson but were anyone to actually bother to look at TfL’s websites, one would be astonished to find out that these cuts had been decided back in 2007 when the Mayor of London was Ken Livingstone.

At the time the unions had no problem with this decision or at least they didn’t consider Becontree ticket office’s fate to be worth paralysing our city. Remarkable what a change of mayors can do isn’t it?

As with some many of our current woes, Labour’s fingerprints are all over this. 

Ken Livingstone decided to cut the ticket offices, the pretext for this strike, and now he is shouting the loudest to pin this decision on his successor. 

It is clear that in his hopefully unsuccessful bid to become mayor of London, he will say and do anything. 
Cllr Gio Spinella
Conservative, Frognal & Fitzjohns ward