Boris and Bob Crow talk for the first time in five years… but the Tube strike’s still on
Bob Crow’s having a busy morning.
The head of the RMT union is at City Hall with his counterpart at the TSSA to try and confront Boris Johnson and his transport staff about the looming Tube strike.
The mayor, meanwhile, was in the middle of his regular phone-in show on LBC – so Crow phoned in, and the pair spoke for the first time in five years.
He started by saying he respected the Mayor and asked to get around the table. “We’d love you to agree with us, and all we want is an opportunity to talk about the future of the Tube.”
But Boris was having none of it until the unions call off the strike.
“I can’t sit down and negotiate with you, let alone negotiate on air, when you’re holding a gun to Londoners’ heads and threatening disruption in the greatest city on earth,” the Mayor said to Crow’s requests to talk.
“We would love to call the strike off, and this strike can be called off … The fact is, a form’s been sent over saying that these jobs are going. That form could be suspended and we could suspend our industrial action,” replied Crow.
Boris: “We’re more than happy to engage in these issues, which you know perfectly well are not within my sphere of competence. This kind of thing that you are getting into is for LU’s negotiators at Acas or with you to get to grips with.”
He went on: “I’m sure you recognise this, that yes of course there are job losses in what we’re proposing to do, we accept that, but there are no compulsory redundancies, Bob.”
“And we’ve already had more than 1,000 people show an expression of interest in voluntary redundancy, a huge proportion of those actually now have a firm intent to seek voluntary redundancy. We could go now with those numbers and through natural wastage or whatever we’d have solved the problem.”
Time is running out for the two sides to reach a truce ahead of a 48-hour walkout on the Tube, which is due to start at 9.30pm tonight.
See our guide to navigating London during the strikes.