The torrent of Establishment propaganda against the RMT union cannot hide the reality that this and next week’s Tube strikes are about defending London’s transport network.

Passengers are inconvenienced by strike action on the Tube. But Transport for London’s plans to close down every single ticket office on the network and axe 953 station staff posts are downright dangerous.

TfL has used every tired trick in the management book to sell its rose-tinted vision of the understaffed, under-resourced future to Londoners.

Customer service will apparently be better without ticket offices since staff won’t be behind a window but out and about on the station.

That might of course make them harder to find for customers in need of assistance — especially as there’ll be a thousand fewer of them to start with.

Buying tickets won’t be a problem since more ticket machines are planned. But anyone remotely familiar with the Tube knows that machines can be out of service or make mistakes — which is when you need an actual staff member to hand to help.

Bosses claim that ticket offices are on the way out anyway — that only 3 per cent of tickets are sold at ticket offices, for example. Actually they are responsible for 23 per cent of ticket transactions.

And ticket office use is rising — with over 150,000 more transactions in 2013 than took place in 2012.

That’s because London is growing. Passenger numbers are predicted to rise by 14 per cent in the next five years — a situation that demands more staff, not fewer.

Londoners know it. The latest poll shows that only one in four people agree with Mayor Boris Johnson’s claim that planned changes will improve services.

The mayor’s disgraceful intervention yesterday — claiming that RMT’s legal industrial action was a “wildcat” strike and promising that a re-elected Tory government would seek to make strike action harder in a country that already groans under some of the most repressive anti-trade union laws in the developed world — was the knee-jerk posturing of a man who has lost the argument.

Johnson himself pledged publicly and repeatedly that he would oppose the closure of any ticket offices as mayor — only to U-turn in classic coalition style and support closing all of them.

And his pre-election claim that he would negotiate a “no-strike deal” with unions was pretty rich from a man who has not deigned to meet transport union leaders even once.

RMT acting general secretary Mick Cash may be right that the mayor has provoked this strike as part of his ill-concealed bid to win the Conservative leadership.

But the issues at stake for London are bigger than the Old Etonian bunfight between a pair of Tory toffs.

An efficient, properly staffed and safe transport network relies on TfL abandoning its reckless scheme. RMT is fighting for all our sakes.

Why we march

Workers from all countries will today mark International Workers’ Day. Marches and rallies will occur across Britain and the world.

In London, marchers will especially honour two
giants of the labour movement who passed away this year, Tony Benn and Bob Crow.

Capitalism both at home and abroad is more vicious, more lethal and more dangerous than ever. 

But it is also visibly failing, lurching from crisis to crisis, presiding over increasing impoverishment, misery and environmental destruction.

There is no future for humanity under capitalism. Today we honour fallen comrades but most importantly commit to winning revolutionary change to end the rotten system they spent their lives fighting.