The Guardian profile: Bob Crow


Kevin Maguire
Friday July 2, 2004
The Guardian

Commuters who suffered nightmare journeys during the London Underground strike that this week halted tube trains and gridlocked roads should tremble.

Bob Crow, the general secretary of the RMT union, is the proud new owner of a "battlebus" - and it will become a familiar sight at picket lines around the country.

The former London Transport double-decker, repainted in the RMT's green livery, will function as a strike headquarters - and no union leader calls more industrial action ballots than Crow. At one point, say rail industry executives, there were 17 ballots under way.

Employers complain that he shouts "strike" first and offers to negotiate second, and that he is an old-fashioned class warrior all too happy to lead the workers out on strike. Tony Blair makes digs at him, the transport secretary, Alistair Darling, refuses to meet him, New Labour despises him and the TUC bureaucracy plots against him.

In the rightwing press, he is public enemy number one, a wrecker, a dinosaur, a Fred Kite character, a Marxist militant - the latter a tabloid term of abuse he is delighted to embrace. Two years ago, he was attacked outside his house with an iron bar by two strangers. He blames the assault on the newspapers that persistently demonise him.

But what really gets up the noses of his enemies is that he can claim to be a success. During his stewardship of the RMT since succeeding the late Jimmy Knapp in February 2002, membership has risen 14,000 to 71,000. Crow points to numerous above-inflation pay rises, the return of railway maintenance in-house and, with a strike looming, the u-turn that saw Network Rail forced to reopen its final-salary pension scheme.

Pooh-poohing modern campaigning techniques, Crow boasted: "We didn't do it with balloons, we didn't do it by being nicey-picey, hoping they will feel sorry for us and take pity on us. We did it by threatening industrial action."

Requests for on-the-record chats to discover what adversaries really think of Crow failed to elicit interviews with Ken Livingstone, the London mayor, Transport for London's top brass, the Strategic Rail Authority chairman, the Association of Train Operating Companies' director-general, Virgin's main railman or the head of Network Rail.

Network Rail issued a short statement on behalf of its chief executive, John Armitt, portraying little of the private anger over Crow taking the body to the brink of a strike before pulling back after securing the pensions deal.

"On the few occasions I have dealt directly with Bob, I have found him to have a clear understanding about what he wants and that he is willing to make a sensible assessment of what is achievable," said Mr Armitt.

Now 43, the east London docker's son joined the rail industry at 16 as a tube track worker and swiftly worked his way through the activist ranks of the then National Union of Railwaymen.

He was a member of the Communist party, but quit over its insistence that members should support all Labour parliamentary candidates. He joined Arthur Scargill's Socialist Labour party, but resigned when it opted to challenge all Labour parliamentary candidates.

Crow believes that Labour has betrayed the working class. He has cut the union's financial contributions and withdrawn support from MPs, including Robin Cook, who refused to sign up to a union programme of rail renationalisation and heavy government backing for the merchant navy.

Labour expelled the RMT in February, and Crow puzzled the party hierarchy by threatening legal action to stay in, going through the quarterly charade of posting the £3,000 affiliating cheque, only for it to be returned.

Crow's third-floor office in the RMT HQ between Euston and King's Cross stations in London is a shrine to his beliefs. Ceremonial sashes worn by branch officials in the days of the old NUR hang from the walls, and there is a bust of Lenin on the shelf.

At his union's conference in Portsmouth, the diehard republican complained that he was portrayed as a "Little Englander" for opposing the euro. "They say I want to see the Queen's head on a fiver. The Queen's head? I don't care if it's the Queen's arse," he said. "The euro is still undemocratic."

He can transform abstruse one-liners into an art form. When he said he wanted Tony Benn elected president of Britain because he is a "true representative of working people", an interviewer pointed out that Benn was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and had renounced a hereditary title.

"Just because you go to the Virgin Islands, it doesn't make you a virgin, does it?" was Crow's baffling response.

Crow voted for Livingstone as London mayor on June 10, and for Green party candidates for the London assembly and Brussels.

But he made no attempt to hide his fury when Livingstone urged RMT members to cross tube picket lines, expressing "thou shall not cross" as the 11th commandment and resigning from Transport for London.

Livingstone rang Crow this week to mend fences and reassure him about a tube pay and hours offer, though the RMT leader will neither forgive nor forget.

Union leaders, like rail bosses, shy away from publicly criticising Crow, despite complaints in some quarters that he is strike-happy.

He is close to Mick Rix, former general secretary of Aslef, and the two were comrades in Scargill's party before Rix rejoined Labour and Crow quit.

Crow and Aslef chief Shaun Brady are barely on speaking terms since trading blows on a visit to Prague in the early 1980s, when the RMT general secretary was incensed at his counterpart's treatment of a female delegate. Crow and Rix argued about the death penalty - Crow in favour, Rix against - on another union friendship visit to Potsdam.

"Bob's been a personal friend of mine ever since we were 20 years of age and the one thing you get with Bob is that he's upfront and is straight and is honest. He may be a tough character to deal with but he is unjustly maligned," says Rix.

"He's increased membership, improved pay and conditions and always puts the rail man and woman first. Anyone can carp about his style of leadership but look at his results."

Crow is paid £63,000 a year. He does not have a driving licence and uses public transport daily rather than a chauffeur.

Hostile newspapers accused him of extravagance over an officers' meeting at Gloucestershire's Corse Lawn House hotel on the eve of Millwall's FA Cup final against Manchester United across the Severn Bridge in Cardiff. Crow shrugged off criticism of the £4,203.74 bill, including wine at £16.20 a bottle.

Then there was the disclosure that Nicola Hoarau, Crow's wife and mother of their four children, had been appointed chief executive of the RMT credit union.

Colin Cook, Milton Keynes RMT branch secretary and foe of Crow, charged the union leader with filling posts with "henchmen".

Never one to hide behind a "no comment" or his loyal union PR man and former communist comrade Derek Kotz, Crow protested that his wife was the only applicant and revealed that he had even interviewed her.

Crow said in April that he would not keep apologising for inconvenience caused by industrial action because people would accuse him of crying crocodile tears. Ahead of this week's tube strike, he said he regretted the industrial action and insisted his were not crocodile tears.

The two positions may not be contradictory, but the earlier statement is thought by those who claim to know him best to capture the authentic Crow.

He will never be - indeed, never aspires to be - the darling of the travelling public, and commuters can expect to see more of that green double-decker battlebus.