London transport down the tubes

During the era of the bus boycotts in the south of the USA, civil rights campaigners used to sing "You don't need to ride Jim Crow/ No, you don't need to ride Jim Crow," but now a new anthem is required for our times with the tube strike, only just ended apparently. "'You ain't going to ride,' - Bob Crow/ 'No, you ain't going to ride,' - Bob Crow." Yes, he was voted in by members, but was so was the current US president for a second term, and yes, the members voted for the strike, but only after he whipped them up.
Bob Crow is actually endangering 95% of his members' rights because with the meltdown of MetroNet, a commercial company in the farce that is the Private-Public Partnership, it was damanded that all London Underground workers who had to join Metronet's auspices were given guarantees over LU job security and pensions. This was granted before the strike. It's the 5% who joined Metronet in the last two years and therefore have no claim to LU job security or pensions on whose behalf the strike is happening. When you join a a private organisation, you sink or swim with its fortunes. Unions are partly about sticking up for an underdog, but this particular set joined after the LU rules were confirmed for existing members, not future ones. Moreover, two of the three unions affected by the demise of Metronet's contract accepted the terms and conditions. Only Crow's RMT did not.
It was a piece of political spite by a so-called Labour government to inflict the PPP farrago on Londoners, particularly directed at Ken Livingstone, orchestrated by the authoriatarian nature of the New Labour machine to quash dissent when it could not ride it out. Londoners were suffering enough as it was without the antics of Bob Crow and his refuseniks. Such immoderate behaviour and contempt for the public by the unions in the 1970s and '80s was the equivalent of signing their own death warrant. It was union leaders like Bob Crow who ushered in 18 years of Conservative rule and gave a popular mandate for the power of the unions to be broken. Many people would like to see Bob Crow broken. To use one of Crow's favouite phrases, 'at the end of the day', it's time for the sun to set on his cantankerous career.