THE General Secretary of ASLEF says the unions ‘hasn’t walked away from the table’ as rail strikes continue to cause disruption across the country.

Mick Whelan also told GB News he felt it was too soon to arbitrate.

Speaking to Alastair Stewart he said: “I was in Portsmouth yesterday, I’ll be in Skipton tomorrow, I go around the country talking directly to my people.

“Some of our people think we’re not going hard and fast enough, and we’ve only had three days out.

“Our people are passionate about their futures and the right to self-determine their futures. And I just would like to make the point that every employee that we work for is making money.

“Every employee that we worked for during the pandemic when we went to work made £500m pounds during the pandemic.

“They’ve signed contracts to keep making money. All this talk about modernization is actually about productivity for nothing. But we are back in talks tomorrow.”

His comments came after Mick Lynch accused train companies of incompetence and insisted that the campaign of rail strikes is not politically motivated.

He told GB News: “We’ll go on until we get a settlement, we were waiting for the company to change their position.

“They set out their stall, they’ve not offered us a pay rise, they’ve not offered us the guarantees on job security, and they want to rip up our conditions, shut every booking office in Britain, take all the guards off the train.

“It’s a very serious situation and our members will keep going until we get a solution and that will happen around the negotiating table if the Government changes their position.”

Asked if the strikes were damaging the rail industry, he added: “Well, we’re not damaging the rail industry. If you take Avanti the West Coast, which is where I’m standing outside now at Euston, they are destroying the industry, they can’t run the service when we’re not on strike.

“The problem is the way that the railway is managed and the demands they’re making on our members. We will adapt and negotiate to new conditions, and we’ve adapted to new technology all along.”

“But that doesn’t explain why these members standing behind me now haven’t had a pay rise for three years while the companies are extracting £500 million in profit last year. The chief executive of First Group who run Avanti West Coast and other railway companies took over £1 million in salary last year, and he will benefit from the tax breaks that the Tories want to give them.

“We’ve got a basket case of a railway industry and they’re making demands on us that they know we can’t accept the management. No, we can’t accept them.

“The Government’s got to change their position so that we can get a deal that we can all be supportive of but that’s not in sight at the moment.”

Mr Lynch said: “This is not a political strike. The people behind me are not politicians. They’re ordinary men and women that want a decent day’s pay for a decent day’s work. That’s what we’re after.

“The idea that this is some kind of political strike – you’re just peddling nonsense. And I’m sick and tired of hearing it from politicians who come out with this rubbish and journalists that just recycle, it’s so easy for you to just say, this is a political strike. That’s absolute nonsense.

“I don’t know where you get it from, we want a deal. We want a set of conditions we can work with. And we want job security. That’s nothing to do with politics.”

He added: “We are here to settle an industrial dispute, which is about pay conditions and jobs as well as our pensions.

“It’s up to the Tory party who they put in government. They have deposed at least two Prime Ministers without an election in the last five years. It’s nothing to do with what railway workers are doing. We want the settlement of this dispute.

“The idea that somehow 40,000 railway workers who were threatened with their jobs are going to bring down the government is nonsense. It’s just peddling a myth, frankly, we want a settlement to an industrial dispute.”