RMT general secretary Mick Lynch is merrily destroying MPs and pundits with a single weapon: Sincerity

June 22, 2022 1:48 pm(Updated 5:24 pm)

In the past few days, Mick Lynch has ruined everyone who challenged him. One after another they came – and left worse than they entered. The RMT general secretary has used a combination of plain-speaking, quick-thinking, bemusement and basic mockery to pursue a one-man PR war in defence of his rail strike. He’s taken a dispute which would normally outrage commuters and given it a compelling moral and political justification.

Tory MP Jonathan Gullis tried his luck against Lynch yesterday, murmuring cynically and disingenuously about how the strike was affecting “those armed forces veterans who risked their lives for our freedoms”. Lynch was appropriately condescending. “I want a settlement to this dispute,” he replied. “I can’t do that with a backbench MP who’s just learned [his lines] off a script.”

On Newsnight, Lynch called junior minister Chris Philp a liar 16 times, by my count. It may have been more. Labour shadow minister Jenny Chapman gave it a go, only to be told: “I don’t even know who you are.”

Good Morning Britain‘s Richard Madeley, the stupid man’s Alan Partridge, asked Lynch if he was a Marxist, “because if you are a Marxist, you’re into revolution and into bringing down capitalism”. Lynch laughed.

“The most remarkable twaddle,” he replied. “I emphasise I’m not talking twaddle,” Madeley said, stumbling badly. Lynch looked exasperated. “Well, that’s what it looks like to me.”

You can imagine a PR consultant in an office somewhere being fascinated by what Lynch has accomplished. What exactly is his approach? What technique is he using? The key is that he is not using a technique.

He gave a very revealing answer to the first question he was asked on the BBC’s Political Thinking podcast recently. Nick Robinson wondered if he was enjoying the limelight. He replied: “Well, it’s more exciting than dealing with some paperwork, I suppose.”

It sounds like nothing, but in fact it is everything. It’s the sort of thing no PR professional would ever recommend. No trade union boss threatening the inconvenience of commuters should admit that they are actually kind of enjoying their time doing media interviews. But by saying it Lynch came across as utterly sincere. And it therefore followed that his later political comments were sincere as well.

Lynch feels fresh because he is speaking clearly when all around him are talking in code. Labour’s messaging on the strike has been utterly hopeless.

Sir Keir Starmer could see the predictable Tory assault coming and went out of his way to avoid it, but he found himself in a middle ground with no purchase. He wouldn’t condemn the strike. He wouldn’t support it. He banned his front bench from standing on picket lines, but they did it anyway. He tried to neutralise the Tory attack at the cost of his sincerity.

The Tory approach is considerably worse. They set the terms by which National Rail can negotiate, not least through financial restrictions, but they refuse to attend the negotiations. They then rail against a strike they have done nothing to prevent and in fact seem perfectly happy about. Conservative ministers can barely conceal their glee at having stumbled into another wedge issue they think can damage Labour. But when it comes to solutions for the dispute, they have nothing to offer whatsoever.

Any sane individual watching the Labour or Conservative response can see that something’s up. They’re not engaging with the issue. They’re trying to figure out their vulnerability to it and the potential advantages. They cannot speak clearly because clarity would damage them. And so you get the standard party political messaging: the evasiveness, the inability to give clear answers, the wilful disingenuousness, the cheap underhand tactics, the contorted automaton-like management-speak.

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It wasn’t always like this. Politicians once used to speak with clarity and specificity. When you look at old videos of Harold Wilson or Edward Heath, they’re full of the same concern for their own self-preservation as today’s party leaders are. But they still spoke in concrete falsifiable terms and respected the intelligence of the viewer.

Lynch is the same. He’s no saint. He’s not even necessarily right. But he deals in clear-cut statements which can be appraised by the viewer.

He was told on Sky News this weekend that the Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey was calling for pay restraint. He replied, quick as a flash: “Pay restraint? He’s on £600,000 a year.” It was brilliantly effective. “If workers’ wages don’t go up, it means a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.” This was also true.

And then he said something else. “This idea that there’s a wage price spiral is nonsense.” There, he fell into difficulty. The main causes of the inflationary surge are Covid, Ukraine and Brexit. And yet the trigger for inflation can be distinct from that which sustains it. Once inflation takes off, wage rises can contribute to it.

But what’s interesting about Lynch is not how right he is, or how self-interested. It is his clarity and authenticity. We can disagree on the wage price statement. Most importantly, we can falsify it. And that means that it is at least a meaningful sentence. It is a clear position, which we can challenge or support. It is entirely different from a party unable to say whether it supports or opposes a strike, or one which will only address it insofar as it satisfies unrelated electoral ambitions.

It’s a kind of political communication which is still grounded in the concept of meaning and conviction. If more leaders, from left and right, were to adopt that approach, we would live in a healthier political culture.