A two-day Tube strike was set to begin last night after London Underground (LU) snubbed its workers and continued with plans for dangerous and unwanted ticket office closures.

London Mayor Boris Johnson’s umbrella group Transport for London has tried to spin the effective cuts on the London Underground as not conducive to “compulsory redundancies.”

But transport union RMT is standing its ground in defence of 953 jobs. 

“The current plans — closing every ticket office and axing nearly a thousand safety-critical jobs — are solely about massive austerity cuts driven centrally by David Cameron and his government and implemented by Mayor Boris Johnson,” said the RMT acting general secretary Mick Cash. 

TfL argues that all stations will continue to be staffed, but with the threat of further cuts to be applied to the London Underground that promise may ring hollow. 

Neither TfL nor London Underground has been able to provide numbers of staff per station following the cuts. 

And with the Tube becoming operational for 24 hours at weekends from 2015, questions around safety have increased.

Mr Cash said that RMT “could have recommended the suspension of this strike action if LU had responded positively to our proposal to halt the implementation of these savage cuts.”

RMT, together with members of the London Assembly, have called for comprehensive public consultation on the future of the London Underground. 

The walkout, due to start last night at 9.30pm and finish tomorrow at the same time, was branded by Mr Johnson as “pointless.”

Workers from across the London Underground were due to take part in the strike, together with Heathrow Express RMT members, who are separately protesting over pay and job cuts. 

Despite recent Tory Party claims that it was the new workers’ party, Prime Minister David Cameron was quick to label the walkout as “wrong” and “unjustified.” 

But Mr Cash said: “The RMT remains available for serious and meaningful talks around our alternative proposals.”

And he lamented that “as a consequence of the management stance the action, which is about halting savage, cash-led attacks on jobs, services and safety, goes ahead as planned.”