Kay Burley's Super Sounds of the 70s

Media coverage of the rail strikes certainly has a retro feel to it.

INTERVIEWEE: Our job as a trade union is to maintain the purchasing power of our members' salaries and that's all we're trying to do with the pay claim that we've now formulated.

ITN PRESENTER: But as reasonable men and responsible citizens can you say that's all you are trying to do and all you are interested in when you hear warnings from the Chancellor to the effect that increases of this sort are going to wreck the national economy?

That exchange could have taken place on any UK news programme today but it’s actually from 1975, as recounted in The Glasgow Media Group’s book Really Bad News (1982). Much of the British media doesn’t need to “go back to the back old days of the 1970s” as the government and their outriders at The Sun and Daily Mail keep howling; they’ve never moved on from them.

In fact, reporting on unions is much worse in 2022 than it was in the 70s because after the slow extinction of the industrial correspondents through the 80s and 90s, disputes are seen entirely through the framing of government and “business leaders”. Rhetoric about “union barons masterminding strikes” is thrown around largely unchallenged.

It’s also why columnists like The Daily Telegraph’s Tim Stanley — who was born in 1982 — can paint mythical pictures of a decade they didn’t experience. He writes:

You ’eard Mick! Everybody out!”

On Monday afternoon, the RMT abandoned negotiations and triggered a summer of discontent, forcing us onto a slow-moving train back to the Seventies, minus the consolations of cheap beer and good music (Harry Styles in his nan’s cardie is the closest we’re getting to Glam).

Mick Lynch’s retro press conference so stunk of stagflation that all it was missing was Jack from On The Buses with a fag in his mouth and an arm around a dolly bird, shouting, “What about the workers?!” - those knights of labour who never want to strike but always have “no choice.” After all, three thousand quid an hour to clip tickets isn’t much to ask for.

This is partly generational cosplay for his ageing readership for whom references to Glam and On The Buses (which ended in 1973) seem warm and familiar.

If Stanley had been around to witness Glam, he’d no doubt have been terrified by David Bowie and written Mary Whitehouse-style letters to get Marc Bolan banned. This is, after all, a man who remains psychically scarred by that time some builders laughed at his bowtie.

Still, Stanley is only following the example of people who actually were there but choose to distort the history for their current purposes. In The Daily Mail, David Blunkett — always ready to rage in a right-wing paper for the right fee — thunders under the headline I am a proud trade unionist - but these strikes will hurt ordinary workers most that:

… the unions need to recognise that times have changed, and a 'workers versus bosses' mentality is too simplistic.

… Britain undoubtedly needs a lively trades union movement. But that same movement must also be up-to-date, facing the challenge of globalisation and carrying enough sophistication to be able to deal with those who actually pull the strings — and not the men and women trying to get to work or the children who want to go to school.

Today, we all — and especially the union leaders — need to remember that the world has moved on, and the simplicities of the past have gone for ever.

For all his technocratic warbling about “modern” movements, Blunkett basically wants unions to be historical curiosities like steam fairs or the Beamish living museum.

The front-page of The Daily Mail edition that carries Blunkett’s op-ed features language that would let you complete an “anti-union” bingo card in one sitting:

Union barons will force towns and the cities into ‘lockdown’ and cost hospitality firms £1 billion this week, business leaders warned last night… The militant RMT union was accused of ‘punishing millions of innocent people’…

The continued use of the phrase “union barons” in a 21st-century nation that still has actual Barons is really something and the Mail doesn’t bother to name who came up with the “punishing millions…” line. Nor does it note that a 3 per cent pay rise — the offer it claims rail bosses have put forward — amounts to yet another real-terms cut.

The underlying narrative of the editorials in the newspapers raging against the strikes is of workers against other workers. It’s a transparent bid to make readers angry not with the government or the kind of rich men who own those papers but with other people trying to ensure proper pay and conditions.

There is an outlier in The Daily Telegraph as Suzanne Moore writes:

The narrative is always the same: bad strikers disrupting the lives of people as if ordinary people are not workers themselves, as if working conditions have not improved precisely because of unions or “collective bargaining”.

… Strikes are a real pain but at least see them for what they are: an organised response to organised greed.

… but her column — which exists to give the paper the illusion of being home to vaguely heterodox opinion — is swamped by the comments beneath it and the op-eds around it.

Meanwhile, Sky News and BBC News are competing to publish the most heartrending collections of stories about people inconvenienced by the strike (come for “school girl may have 4-hour journey to get to exam”, stay for “man worries he might miss his stag do”). Neither of those articles includes the reasons for the strike.

Among all of today’s retro coverage though, Kay Burley’s interview with RMT General Secretary, Mick Lynch, stands out. While she gave Transport Secretary, Grant Shapps, a light verbal slapping in the same broadcast, it was “Mr Lynch” for whom she reserved her real ire.

The interview reached its crescendo near the end when Burley repeatedly asked what would happen if agency staff “tried to get through a picket line” — something that the government is threatening to do but which remains illegal — and insinuating that RMT members might be violent while refusing to say it outright.

Lynch resolutely refused to be drawn into that trap, turning to show the peaceful picket line behind him, and suggesting that Burley had “gone off into the world of the surreal” and that her questions were “verging into the nonsense”.

Burley’s Twitter account — which is handled by a junior producer while she’s on-air — tweeted the clip claiming it was, in fact, Lynch “who got a little flustered”. It’s the kind of spin that would make even Saddam Hussein’s old PR guy blush.

Perhaps 49 years from now, someone like me will be quoting Burley’s interview with Lynch and still bemoaning that coverage of strikes is still far from even-handed. It’s a bet I’m willing to take even if the workers in question will be cyborgs or working on AI Elon Musk’s asteroid mines.

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