UK Aslef rail union boss Mick Whelan: ‘I'm not a great fan of glorious defeats’

UK Aslef rail union boss Mick Whelan: ‘I'm not a great fan of glorious defeats’
After months of strikes causing transport chaos across the south-east, Mick Whelan is fast becoming Britain’s most-hated union leader. But the stakes are so high he won’t be backing down, he says
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jan/14/mick-whelan-aslef-train...

‘I don’t shout at people. We want to make our case in a rational way’ … Aslef general secretary Mick Whelan. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian
Simon Hattenstone
Saturday 14 January 2017 06.00 GMTLast modified on Saturday 14 January 2017 09.43 GMT

‘Interesting times,” Aslef boss Mick Whelan says, with an understated smile. It’s 11am on Thursday, and he’s already had a session with his legal team. Earlier this week the train drivers’ union was on strike, bringing Southern rail – and a fair bit of the south-east – to a stop. On Wednesday night, Southern announced it would take Aslef to the supreme court to try to have upcoming strikes declared illegal. It’s both a complex and a simple battle over a proposal to extend DOO (Driver Operation Only) trains. Complex in the details (the fact that many companies have been operating DOO for more than a decade; the technology used; the laws being cited by Southern in the hope of outlawing the strikes) and simple in the principle – scrapping guards on large trains is unsafe for passengers, says Aslef, and puts drivers under extreme pressure.

Whelan’s office is poky, but packed with paraphernalia: vintage Aslef badges, pictures of coal-fuelled locomotives, biographies of Keir Hardieand Dennis Skinner, campaign leaflets. On the wall behind him is a huge black-and-white photograph of a 1971 demo to “Kill the Bill”. He swivels in his chair, looks up at it, and laughs. “Unfortunate way it’s worded,” he says. “That was about killing the employment bill, not the police. I’ve had people come in here and think I’m some kind of football thug.” In the corner of a room is a pile of official Chelsea football magazines.

Whelan is a bear of a man, with a gruff cockney voice and a soft boxer’s handshake. Today, he is bearded. But normally, shaven-headed and shaven-faced, he could pass for a jumbo-sized Bob Crow. That’s not entirely inappropriate, because Whelan – or Militant Mick, as he is referred to these days – might be about to inherit Crow’s mantle as Britain’s most-hated trade union leader. Like Crow, who died three years ago, he is general secretary of a small but powerful transport trade union (Aslef’s 19,000 working members account for 95% of the country’s train drivers) that can cause havoc by calling out its workers. Whereas Crow tended to rely on his rhetoric and his street-fighter smarts, Whelan is more of a data nerd – part barrow boy, part actuary. He’s more likely to grind you down with an equation than with polemic. (“Freight is basically volume times distance,” he says within minutes of meeting me.)

It would be hard enough to win over the public without a hostile media determined to monster him as an extremist who promised “10 years of passenger hell” (he insists he never said these words to transport secretary Chris Grayling); hypocritical (photographs of him travelling on the trains he says are dangerous); and greedy (his pay package is often quoted as £137,000, though this includes pension and national insurance contributions; his actual salary is £94,000.) Some of the “exposés” have been laughable – not least that he lives in a “£500,000” house in Wembley (cheap for London).

FacebookTwitterPinterest
Aslef members on the picket line outside Selhurst Park station in south London in December last year. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
But yes, he says, of course he knows why rail users are upset with him. “If I’m the travelling public, and I’m paying the excessive fares they’re paying, up to £5,000-£6,000 a year for a second-class, 60-minute journey from the south coast, and I can’t get to work and I’ve had my pay frozen for years, I don’t look at the reason for the dispute, I just look at how it impacts on me.”

What he has to do, he says, is get over his side of the story and dispel the myths. “If I was to ask you when was the last time we took industrial action on Southern, as an impartial observer, you’d probably say, ‘You’re taking it all the time,’ when the reality is that the last time was 2000. So one falling out in 17 years is hardly us rushing to the barricades every two minutes. We’re not a trade union that’s recognised as being ultra-militant or seeking to have battles all the time.” As he points out, when he was appointed vice chair of the Labour Policy Forum, most papers said: “Oh, they’ve elected a moderate.”

Next, he says, he has to convince the public that they and the drivers share a common interest. “We know what passengers want: clean, safe trains that run on time and are affordable. Strangely enough, the same things we want. So outside the week of a dispute, you’ll find people agreeing with us 100%. Even in this dispute, polls have shown that 73% of people want a guard or safety-critical person on a train. Fact.”

I’m confused, I say – didn’t the union agree to driver-only operation years ago? Yes, he says, but the circumstances were different; trains now have more carriages and carry many more passengers, and when they agreed to DOO it was on the understanding that the all-important blue light would fail to come on in the driver’s cabin if anybody was trapped in a door, and the train would automatically stop. But history has shown that the technology is not 100% reliable. “A report came out last year that says we cannot rely on that technology any more. So what do we do as an organisation? Ignore it?”

The report investigated an incident in which a passenger was trapped in the door. “The driver might well go to prison. He’s no longer a member of Aslef – there are other things he didn’t do on the day – but the fact is, regardless of his activity, the picture is of a woman with her hand clearly trapped in the door and she’s off her feet being dragged 60 feet along the platform. We were told that could never happen, and that we’re luddities against modernisation, but they are using 1980s and 90s technology designed for three-car trains and a quarter of the footfall we now enjoy – 1,100 people on these 12-car trains, and people just urging us to get out of the platform for the next train to get in.” The more passionate he gets, the faster he talks. Now he sounds like the Ben Elton of trade union activism.

Advertisement

What infuriates him most is the luddite smear, when in fact Aslef is protesting against outdated technology. “Yes, the trains are new, but the technology is old.” Take the multiple CCTV images the drivers see of the platform, he says. “In some areas we’re given two seconds to assimilate 24 images. Now if I was to take you to the caff across the road, lift the menu up to you, give you two seconds to read the first 24 items, then ask you to tell me what’s happening at item 6, 7 and 14, quite rightly, you couldn’t do it. I can’t do it and I speed read.”

The chief inspector of railways recently concluded that DOO “can be safe”. Again, Whelan was criticised for distinguishing between “can” and “is”. Southern said he was dancing on a semantic sixpence. But he isn’t having any of it. “Read it,” he says. “I know the difference between ‘is’ and ‘can’. I negotiate for a living. You have to know the value of words, and he said it can be safe; he didn’t say it was safe. He went on to say that people had to be trained, and the right equipment and processes had to be in place. Well, we know drivers that haven’t been trained and been expected to drive these trains, we know they went out and found that the lenses on the mirrors weren’t being cleaned and drivers couldn’t see.”

In short, he says, it is impossible for drivers to ensure the safety of passengers getting on and off the train. “You don’t have to be a train driver to know that. If you’re a commuter and you use a major station, you will see people five or six deep on a platform, you’ll see a train run in rammed to the gills and people saying, ‘Please stand back, there’s one two minutes behind,’ yet nobody stands back. No train is meant to leave if there isn’t a gap between the train and the public – what they call the passenger-train corridor. We know that virtually every train in London, in Birmingham and elsewhere, at peak times, is ignoring the safety of the railway.”

And the thing is, he says, when a disaster happens, the bosses are never held accountable. “I haven’t seen one company director in the past 20 years who has got a fiduciary responsibility hauled in to the dock, had their job taken away or go to prison for it – but I have seen it happen to guards, platform staff and drivers.”

Advertisement

Should the company be charged with corporate manslaughter if a passenger dies in such circumstances? “Yes. If these people are telling us the system is safe, when it goes wrong, do you pass the blame to the lowest common denominator who you are forcing to do it, because we are now in a penalty-driven industry? We spend more time writing reports about why a train is late, so somebody can offcost it to another stakeholder, than we do about safety.”

Whelan, now 56, has spent 31 years in Aslef as guard, driver, union official and ultimately general secretary. He was born to Irish parents in Paddington, London. His mother worked in a sweet shop (at Euston station) and his father was a bricklayer. It was his father, he says, who really politicised him. “He was into rights on building sites, health and safety and all things we didn’t have back then. He was SWP [Socialist Workers Party]. Mum was always hard Labour. My wife is ex-Workers Revolutionary Party, so let’s not go there – she’s mellowed a bit down the years!”

Whelan was a bright boy who passed the 11-plus and went to grammar school: the Oratory, where Tony Blair sent his children. He devoured books, loved learning, and hoped to go to university. But his father fell off scaffolding, could no longer work, and that was the end of Whelan’s university dream. He spent a couple of years working as a bank clerk before joining Aslef. Whelan has three grownup children, and is married to Lorraine Phelan, chief biomedical scientist for special haematology at St Mary’s Hospital, London. He tells me with huge pride that she has an MBE for her work in the health service.

He laughs at the fact that he is suddenly being called “Militant Mick”. Sure, he’s always been political and supports Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour, but he says he hasn’t a militant bone in his body. Isn’t he just an old-fashioned protectionist, defending jobs long past their sell-by date? “No. This isn’t purely about us believing in the protection of jobs, because they tell us they’re going to keep all these people. But they are going to take their safety skills away. They won’t be able to evacuate, lead people down a track if there’s a major incident, deal with anybody if a driver collapses.”

It would be a lot easier, he says, if he was fighting a more traditional battle. “I’d find it far easier to be aggressive if you were saying, ‘Well, if we’re going to do someone else’s job, give us 10 grand for it.’ We’re not doing that. Or: ‘If we’re going to be doing other people’s roles, give us a shorter working week.’ We’re not doing that. I got criticised the other day for saying some of my members were really scared, but they are. They’re terrified about safety and terrified for their futures.”

And he’s not even mentioned disability yet. With driver-only trains, it is difficult, if not impossible, for people in a wheelchair to get on a train without advanced warning. In September, Aslef won its case against DOO in Scotland, and disability was a key factor. “We threatened a judicial review in Scotland about disabled access because the law in Scotland on transport access was far stronger than down here, and that helped us win. I believe Southern are suggesting that disabled people in England ring up 24 hours in advance of when they want to travel. The whole basis of the industry is ‘step on and go’. The idea that sectors of our community should have to book in advance when others don’t is anathema to me. Everybody should have the same access and rights to get on and off a train.’”

Why was it easier to win in Scotland than England? “Well, it’s not over yet,” he huffs. And, he insists, he will be happy with nothing less than victory. “The trade union movement is full of glorious defeats, and I’m not a great fan of glorious defeats.”

Does he need a thick skin to be doing his job? He smiles. “You do, and it’s also temperament. I don’t shout at people, I try not to get angry, we’re incredibly data-driven, we want to make our case in a rational way. Nobody takes industrial action lightly. My people don’t want to be losing money, my people don’t want to be verbally abused, they don’t want to be attacked. I don’t want my receptionist fielding death threats downstairs.” And have there been? “You get the odd idiot ringing up saying things they’ll probably never carry out.”

What’s the most offensive thing anybody has said to him? He pauses, and thinks hard. “The most offensive thing to me,” he says finally, “is when people say that I don’t care about workers.”