WHEN workers on the London Underground go on strike, Britain’s capital becomes an odd cocktail of the miserable and the carnivalesque. Blitz-era double-decker buses are drafted back into service. Queues for taxis wind around buildings. Hospital emergency departments fill with out-of-practice cyclists and rollerbladers. For the wobbly, a strike day is a chance for exercise; for the ostentatious, an opportunity to preen (unicyclists mingling with pedestrians in the hairier quarters of the capital). Some even break the habit of a lifetime and venture a conversation with those into whose armpits they are pressed, daily, in the morning crush.
The disruption is immense—a stoppage on July 9th reportedly sapped London’s economy by £300m ($470m)—and strangely reminiscent of Britain’s past, when industrial action by hard-left unions claimed tens of thousands of working days every year. With another shutdown looming on August 5th, Bagehot is tempted to join his fellow commuters in tutting about outfits like the militant National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT), whose Marxist leadership exploits its monopolistic power to extract for its...Continue reading
via Brian Rushton, London is working
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