ANALYSIS BY PETER KELLY
It’s not often that a union leader inspires a nation. But against unlikely odds, this second generation Irishman and Londoner Mick Lynch pulls off the impossible – disrupting a national transport network – and millions of people’s lives – while astonishingly retaining their broad support.
To have a majority of public favor (albeit fickle) in those circumstances speaks to several combined factors. Firstly, the morality of the rail workers’ case is one that is articulately persuasive on the airwaves and TV studios, notwithstanding in government negotiations. Secondly, consistently poor performances from advocates of industrial change – from government figures and their media supporters – often involving bare-faced fact-twisting and cynicism is hardly an invincible opposition. But most of all, the authenticity of Mick Lynch’s approach, backed with facts, figures and most of all, patience, has garnered a surprising support base among both public and commentators alike.
The current British Conservative government remains the worst in living memory, a reputation backed by consistent catastrophic opinion poll data. Not since the dying days of the John Major government in April 1997 which ushered in New Labour’s landslide under the half-Irish Scotsman Tony Blair, has a right wing party been almost universally regarded with such public odium. The repeated folly and fecklessness of the Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and now Rishi Sunak governments – all within 3 years, have created widespread disdain of the austerity agenda and faith in public life or politics.
Step forward Mr Mick Lynch
Flying in to London to meet him on a cold winter’s morning on a picket line outside London’s Euston Station, it was a remarkable sight as journalists from around the world lined up to broadcast his views and probe his policies. And as is his norm, he handled each with aplomb, humor, charm and persuasiveness. Standing in a small corner outside the station with fellow strikers behind him, he cut an usually nonchalant presence for someone of such national prominence.
In our era of misinformation, disinformation and outright falsehood, Mick Lynch provided a refreshing game changer to vacuous and gas-lighting government talking points, with each journalist present clearly impressed with his persuasive answers. Lynch’s approach was the ‘ordinary-man, every-man’ stance, joking with passers-by then cutting away for national TV camera broadcasts with belligerent studio hosts, whom he handled extraordinarily and with ease.
Could there be renewed hope that worker welfare and the age of austerity, so shamelessly promoted for the last 12 years, be coming to an end, and a new UK administration in sight sooner rather than later? If and when that happens in the UK, their national revitalization and renewal of confidence in public leadership will owe much of its inspiration and effort to the son of Irish immigrants who left Cork and Armagh during the war to build a life for their family and those around them.