In his latest Advertiser column, former STV newsman and Rhu resident Mike Edwards offers his thoughts on this week's strikes by the RMT union.

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A COUNTRY paralysed by strikes, the cost of living going through the roof, an energy crisis, talk of a four day week – and to top it all off, Kate Bush at number one in the hit parade.

That was the 1970s – it’s also now. It just goes to show that there is nothing new under the sun. Kind of.

After existing through two years of the biggest upheaval many of us will ever encounter, it is perhaps folly to believe it will be plain sailing from now on.

The Covid crisis hopefully well and truly in the rear-view mirror, we now travel a different long and winding road. Our energy and fuel costs are rampaging, mortgage rates are going up and food costs more.

Although vaccines meant we could see light at the end of the Covid tunnel, this next cost of living obstacle keeps increasing. And there’s more in the post come autumn.

Railway workers are the first to make their stand. They do this because they can, and because they have the strength in depth of a significantly-sized membership. This week has seen disruption on the network of a severity not encountered for decades.

I’m a regular on the rails and enjoy nothing more than parking near Helensburgh’s stations then letting the train take the strain. The strikes have disrupted me too, but when I get on my high horse about the chaos, I remind myself of a couple of things.

I was once on strike for a year, and stood on a picket line outside my newspaper office through rain, hail and shine. My strike was designed to disrupt, dislocate and disable. That’s what strikes are for. Also, my father was a railwayman and a trade union representative.

But what makes the here and now different, and in a sense legitimises it for me, is this.

In my father’s day the railway was the nationalised British Rail, run by the government for the public. Now the railways are privatised, obscenely subsidised, and the significant profits largely go to shareholders, not back into the kitty to improve services.

I don’t blame railway staff for having a go and trying to get a hefty pay rise off the back of a ghastly two years when they did a huge amount to keep the country running. And it’s not our tax money they’re after.

Politics is not my game. I have neither the years of life left, the energy nor desire to enter that lion’s den. But I will say this - privatising utilities is grotesque.