In Britain, we have Schedule 17, the statutory regulations that govern ticket office opening hours. That sounds very technical, but it’s the only regulation that sets out how many people should work in any station from Kings Cross to Luton to the middle of nowhere. They’re seeking to abolish those regulations so that they can do whatever they wish. That would mean there would be nothing to stop them de-staffing any stations to whatever extent they wish, which is exactly what they’re going to do.

For us as railway workers, it means fewer jobs and less safety during working hours. They’ve given us 2,300 redundancy notices at the start of this process; but they also want to rip up the terms and conditions for people working there. It will mean more single-person working and unstaffed stations. The result will be [that] companies [will] make more profits because they’ve got fewer staff costs and overheads.

They’ve still got an obligation under the Equalities Act and Disability Discrimination Act to give accessibility to all sorts of people. But they want to convert everything online and remove the ticket sales clerks. So, instead of elderly or disabled people being able to just turn up at the station and travel, they’d have to book assistance in advance. If you’re an elderly person with limited mobility, and you don’t want to use an app or can’t use an app, that’s not much use. They say, ‘Use the app, and you can book us or use the contact centre.’ But people should expect in this day and age that they can turn up and go. That is the social model of disability which we support, but it applies to many other people too.

The companies won’t just cut costs through this process; they’ll also get property assets. They say they will repurpose ticket offices. They will no doubt turn these into commercial retail outlets, so you’ll get more Costa coffees or whatever they can fit in there. They’ll make more money; the rail will be less accessible; and a whole crowd of our members will be booted out of the industry.

It’s nonsense. They haven’t put forward a modern solution for running stations. They’ve put forward a stripped-back, dehumanised approach. We will talk to them, but there are millions of people who still want to use the retail offer — to buy their tickets, to be directed, and to have assistance. They want a human touch, and they’re just not going to be allowed to have it.

Where they do staff a station, it might be from 7 AM until 9 AM, which is rush hour. At that time, if you turn up as a pensioner looking for discount travel or assistance, you have no chance. It could be an isolated station; there could be bridges to cross; there could be high steps; there could be problems actu-ally mounting the train or getting on board.

What’s being proposed is a dehumanised, stripped-down, and clinical approach to running the railway. They’ve tried it before. It hasn’t worked, and they’ve had to bring staff back on the North London Line. What is now London Overground, Livingstone transformed that; and nobody has challenged it since. They rejuvenated a lot of the lines around London through proper staffing. There was plenty of staff late at night [and] into the early hours. That transformed London Overground and Arriva Rail London. It’s the approach we need.

The employers and bosses will find any way to strip out costs. If they can automate everything and take everybody out, that’s what they’ll do. It means we’re going to have driverless buses, driverless cars, driverless lorries delivering goods to unstaffed retail outlets. You can see it now. When you go into certain shops, you just drop the stuff into a hopper; there’s no checkout at all, and there’s hardly anyone on the shop floor. It depends what kind of society we want.

The other thing that is common with many of these disputes — if you take doctors, nurses, and teachers — it’s about saving the service. There are lots of arguments about funding. In our dispute, I had an industry source tell me that the forgone revenue is £1.5 billion. They’ve done without that; that’s what they’ve lost. It would never have cost that for a decent wage offer. What they call modernisation, reconfiguring the business, we could have worked on that. But now they are so dug in, it’s very hard to find a way through. They’ve lost billions of pounds. If you look at the wider economy, through the rail dispute, it’s easily £5 billion for the UK as a whole. The hospitality [sector] has said it cost them £3.5 billion in lost revenue. It probably would have cost £150 million to settle.

I was up in Berwick recently and I’m going down to Penzance next week. We’ve got lots of community activists, disability activists, and people who just want their town or village to have some character, some heart, and some utility. In Berwick, like a lot of places, a lot of pubs are closed; most bank branches are closed; post offices are under threat. If you lose your ticket office too, it seems like you’re losing every social utility that you might have had. It changes the character of your society and what your community is like. That is a worrying and disturbing thing. Some of the best reactions we’re having are in the smaller towns and villages. People remember all the closures on the railway before. It’s changed the nature of Britain. And not everyone’s got a car or a bus service.

The unions have got a role to play in asking, ‘What is the nature of work? What is the nature of the services that we all need? What is the nature of society? What is the purpose of generating wealth?’ You don’t just distribute wealth by giving people money; you distribute wealth by having services that are properly funded. Local hospitals have gone, for example. They are getting concentrated, and mega hospitals are already quite profitable. You can be sentimental about some of this stuff — some of it wasn’t efficient; some of it did need upgrading. But you can do that in a more sympathetic way that brings people with you.

If you look at where I live in Ealing, there are tower blocks going up everywhere. The problem is not the fact that they’re tower blocks: it’s that they’re not social housing and they’re not designed well. So they alienate people’s minds because of the damage to the social fabric and the look of society. There is something about it — it seems to be ringing bells in people’s minds. It’s not just sentimentality. They understand that once a service is cut, it never comes back. It’s rare that railways ever come back, or that you’ll get a post office back. It’s a once-in-a-generation opportunity to save something.

It also seems that we’re under control. If everything that you buy is through an app or algorithm, you might get the illusion of choice, but it’s not real. They’re giving you a gateway into what they want to give you. I always use this example: if you go to the ticket office and ask, ‘What’s the best way to get from here to Birmingham?’ they might say, ‘Well, actually, if you wait 10 minutes and get on the next one, you will save a third.’ An algorithm is not going to do that for you. A ticket vending machine will just say, buy this ticket because it’s better for us.

When you use any decent customer service outlet staffed by humans, undoubtedly, you’re going to get better service. That is what is troubling people. We’ve got 220,000 replies to this consultation, which is phenomenal because it’s not an easy consultation. But already, we’ve got nearly a quarter of a million responses. It doesn’t solve the dispute, but at least it shows we’re winning the argument and that the work we’ve done about our profile in the dispute is actually resonating with people. When we said, ‘They’re going to close every ticket office,’ I don’t think many people believed us. Now they’re saying, ‘Actually, the RMT said that a year ago.’

Well, I would take it into public ownership. And I would integrate our efforts. I would be talking to the regional mayors and the nations about how we get an integrated public transport system. That doesn’t mean there can’t be differences. I would also put everybody under a common contract of employment so we can sort out the issues about different pay deals and different cycles. I would make a settlement with the staff so that there’s long-term industrial peace.

I would put in place public transport which is good for the environment, a system that attracts people out of their cars, one which is actually serving the people and not profit. Of course, that means it should be properly funded. But I reckon it would be really popular. We could get back to a model where we would generate the income to allow us to modernise the infrastructure properly. Then, we get the best rolling stock, the best bus fleet, and all the rest of it, but it will be completely integrated.

Well, there is good stuff in Europe but they are starting to be blighted by the fact that they are mandated to liberalise. If you go to places like Holland and Denmark, it all seems to work better. Of course, it’s got to be tied up with a policy on road usage, cycling, walking, and the rest of it. So you need a complete transport policy. You can’t just say, this is my policy on buses, that’s my policy on intercity rail, this is my policy on ferries. The whole thing has got to be within an integrated transport and carbon emission policy. We need to retool our public transport system so that it’s modern in a real sense, not in the way that they talk about, just another word for cuts. It needs proper investment; the workforce needs to feel that it’s theirs, and so do the users and taxpayers. That way, it’s actually doing something for the country, rather than the people who’ve got their hands in the till.

Public transport has got the ability to be a tool of liberation. If you’re a poor person living in a poor community and you want to get mobile — either physically mobile, socially mobile, or mobile for work — it’s particularly crucial. There should be consideration about heavily discounted fares in those cases. For instance, for school leavers, first-time workers, those looking for jobs. If you’ve got to be able to do shift work, you’ve got to be able to do early starts, then you’ve got to be able to rely on public transport. It could be a great liberator for some of our more deprived areas, but they’ve got to really feel that they can rely on it rather than just be stuck in their area. We also need to be sure that women and minority groups feel safer on it.

In London, public transport is a bit better. But I’m embarrassed, to be honest, that London fares are cheaper than [those in] many of our regional cities and villages. If you go to Devon, you get on a bus and it can cost you £5.50. You get on one in London, it’s £1.60. That’s because successive mayors — Labour and Tory, including Johnson — didn’t feel they could challenge it. The consensus in London is that we need to invest heavily in public transport and use revenue to support it. In other areas, that consensus is simply not there. You need some central funding, but you also need your local initiatives to ensure that things like bus services are municipally owned.

He’s going for bus franchising, which is under direction. But I’m sure he would support direct municipal ownership. Many of these new mayors would. You’ve got to be able to direct transport rather than just regulate it. Sadiq Khan hasn’t done that in London, because he hasn’t taken it back into public ownership, which he should.

Of course, the aim is to reduce the use of cars because even if we all went electric, you’ll still have problems around congestion and you’ve got the question of where all the batteries come from and the emissions from central power stations. It’s obviously better if people can use public transport. But it needs a bold ten- or twenty-year initiative, not one disrupted every five years by elections. I don’t want to be a dictator, but you need some consensus!

Take the approach to public housing in the forties, fifties, and sixties — it didn’t really change when the governments changed. There was a mass public housing programme because it was supported by everybody, Attlee and MacMillan, even Churchill, and then Wilson. There was an argument about what destitution and squalor was like in this country, in the slums of our cities and towns, and people wanted to change it. Governments did change it through consistent investment. They put a lot of builders to work, got rid of a lot of slums, got a lot of good councils onside. I’m not saying it was perfect — I’m not jewel- eyed about that — but it was much better.

When Thatcher got into power, the consensus went away. She sold off the good housing stock. We’re left with all the poor houses that nobody wants to buy, and you can only get a council house now if you are really hard up. Whereas when I was a kid, even middle-class people could get council houses. It was much more of a mixed social fabric, and we need that in transport.

Thatcher knew what she was about. She had values which we disagree with entirely, but she stated them and she pursued policies consistently to realise those values. What I’d like to see the Labour leadership say is, ‘These are our values about public ownership, about public housing, about a national care service.’ But Starmer’s not saying that. It’s a managerial thing. What he’s thinking about between now and the election, and in the first few months after the election, is to just how to manage the situation. I don’t mind if he doesn’t give us details, but he’s got to show his values. He’s come out with these missions — nobody knows what they are! I doubt anyone in the Labour Party could tell you immediately what they are.

My barber doesn’t say that. My barber is out of work!

If you take Equity, the actors’ union, or the Musicians’ Union, they are adapting because self-employment is often the nature of those industries. But if unions adapt too much to self-employment, then you’re supporting that transition, encouraging things like bogus self-employment. Sometimes the economy moves more quickly than union constitutions move; it’s hard to be completely adapted to everything that’s going on because capitalism moves very quickly.

Well, there’s some truth in that. Sometimes you’re chasing your own tail, spending a lot of money on something that might not be very effective. The answer is sectoral bargaining, which is what we’re pushing Labour to do. In the case of fruit pickers, there used be an agricultural wages board which set wages for all agricultural workers. But obviously if you’re only on a farm for only two months picking all that crop and then you move onto the next farm in a different county, that’s tough for trade unions. What you want is a countrywide agreement that covers everything. Then it’s worth being in a union because the union bargains. When they get to that new farm, workers can make sure that the accommodation is up to spec under the agreement, or the sanitary conditions, the health and safety.

You can do the same in retail and construction, which is a similar one. It’s a massive problem. Those boards need to come back. We used to have them until Thatcher. She dismantled all of the wages boards and collective bargaining. It’s one of the chief issues trade unions have put forward into the Labour Party’s policy forum and elsewhere, to make the case for bringing them back.

They’re not very keen, but there’s a hint that they could do some of it. It’s called the Fair Pay Agreement, but at the moment what we’re hearing is they want to confine it to the care service. The care service is one sector that needs it. If you have a care home that’s only employing twenty people, it’s quite difficult to organise it, but if you have a care sector in London and you say, ‘This is the London rate of pay,’ and that’s under a care national agreement, it would work. You could also bring in a national care pension because they’re all private contractors at the minute. You could have a national care set of holidays, as well as national care grading with new entrants, experienced staff, and supervisors. That’s all the stuff you’d be looking at in sectoral collective bargaining.

Absolutely. You haven’t got to be particularly left-wing to implement those policies. That was all supported by the Attlee and Wilson governments. And those people weren’t from the left of the Labour Party, but they did do a lot. So that’s why I think Starmer needs to put himself in that framework: boldness and radicalism. He doesn’t have to say, ‘I’m a raving socialist.’ But he has to say that we need great change in this country.