The Controlled Opposition of Mick Lynch

‘The World Transformed’, an annual event that holds the distinction of having talked about a great deal and yet has transformed absolutely nothing in its entire existence, recorded a podcast on Sunday 8th October which had as an esteemed guest the General Secretary of the transport union RMT, Mick Lynch.

A particularly egregious clip of the discussion, which has been shared via social media and has been seen over 200,000 times, has Mr Lynch proselytising to young activists not to give up at the first setback and to maintain the long and difficult struggle that is being part of the labour movement.

While on its face Mr Lynch’s words seem quite laudable, the tweet which accompanied the clip in question said:

“Mick Lynch urges leftists to stay part of the Labour movement with [Sir] Keir Starmer at the helm.”

What in fact Mr Lynch was calling for was the unwavering loyalty of the labour movement to the Labour Party, with Sir Keir Starmer, a man who has only been an MP for eight years and shown himself in his previous career as the Director of Public Prosecutions to be a loyal and faithful servant to the ruling class and British imperialism, as its leader.

Mr Lynch came to prominence in June of last year, when he took part in an interview with Sky’s hack journalist-in-chief Kay Burley whilst on a picket line at London’s Euston railway station during an RMT rail strike. Lynch’s performance in that interview and other interviews with similarly hapless ‘journalists’ at the time made him the darling of the left, with many people taking to social media to anoint him as the unofficial Leader of the Opposition. For the first time in many years a working class trade union official had been allowed onto the mass media and then mopped the floor with the hugely-remunerated fools paid to try to catch him out.

Unfortunately Mr Lynch’s radical facade started to show cracks very soon afterwards.

Lynch was at the forefront of the launch of the ‘Enough is Enough’ campaign in Autumn last year, where he made a speech proclaiming that the campaign would “give a voice” to workers. Their list of demands looked eerily similar to those of the ‘Peoples’ Assembly’: wishy-washy demands like increased pay, cuts in energy bills, ending food poverty, decent homes and taxing the rich. As with Peoples’ Assembly, these demands gave no answers to working class people as how exactly they would be achieved and, as with Peoples’ Assembly, it was constituted to funnel people into voting for the Labour Party, has fizzled out and is now a complete irrelevance.

Then there was Lynch’s continued and unabashed fealty to the Labour Party.

Mr Lynch stated in an interview with Sky in September last year that Sir Keir Starmer must “cosy up to working class people” to be an effective opposition leader, overlooking the fact that the Labour Party detests the working class, has never worked in its interests and sees the working class at best as the object of their politics, never the subject of their politics: A charity case that they can throw a few bones to every now and then when they are in power.

In the same interview, Lynch said that Starmer must “show a way that he identifies with the struggles working people have got”. Despite his desperate attempts to create a back-story of earthy and humble beginnings, Starmer is not working class. His toolmaker father owned the tool-making factory and he had a grammar school and university education before embarking on a career in the service of the ruling class. Quite how Mr Lynch could expect a middle-class knight of the realm to find it within himself to identify with struggles he has never known and will never know is not clear.

In July of this year, at the RMT’s Annual General Meeting, Lynch took to the rostrum and, in front of a hall of delegates of a trade union which was thrown out of Labour in 2004 and has renounced the party ever since, said that workers should vote Labour:

“It will be Tory or Labour – that is the simple truth,”

Whereas a little over a year ago Lynch would tacitly imply support for Labour if only Sir Keir Starmer could connect better with the working class, he now calls for workers to vote Labour because the only choice is between them and the Tories, opting to ignore the fact that there is almost nothing in terms of policy to distinguish Labour from the Tories in any way and that life under a Labour Government will be every bit as immiserating for the working class as it will be under the Tories.

Mick Lynch’s rise and fall has been meteoric. Maintaining faith with any movement is one thing, but to remain blindly loyal to a movement which has repeated the same mistakes, made the same misjudgements and held the same misconceptions for decades and appears to have learnt nothing from them is quite another. Lynch, whilst the General Secretary of Britain’s most militant trade union, is anything but a militant himself and is in fact nothing more than controlled opposition.