The Sunday Showdown: Camilla takes on union boss Mick Lynch

0:28The Telegraph Always gets the win. Call 1-800-GRAINGER, visit grainger.com, or just stop by. Grainger, for the ones who get it done. I'm Jake Stouck, co-founder and CEO of Serval. We built Serval to automate the IT work that slows companies down. Onboarding, password resets, access to applications, my laptop stopped working. While employees wait for help, their real work is put on hold. IT desperately wants to automate this work, and that's why they need Serval. You just tell Serval what you want to automate in plain English, and it's built. No drag-and-drop workflows, no expensive consultants.

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1:44What happens when a Telegraph journalist on the right, me, takes on a former union boss in Mick Lynch? We have a great discussion about the issues, employment, trade unions and the Telegraph support of reform. Which we don't support, by the way. Welcome to The Daily Tea with me, Camilla Tomini. And me, Mick Lynch.

2:14Mick Lynch, lovely to see you in the Daily Tea studio. Are you feeling all right as a former... Can I call you a union baron? Is that what you're called? You can't call me a union baron. I was elected by the members. Barons, as we know, are hereditary. They are hereditary. All right, former union boss, do you feel a bit icky being next to the Telegraph logo? Are you going to lose street cred with your former members? It would probably give me credit. I worked at the Telegraph. Did you? In the 1980s. Really? What did you do? Because I was an electrician. We installed the presses at West Ferry when we came out of Fleet Street.

2:44Well, there you have it. And I worked for a company that specialised in printing presses. Well, you've told me something surprising. I was at the FT. Were you? And the Morning Star. Of course you were. I bet you preferred the Morning Star when it came to reading that. You thought it was saying to me, I just got dirty every day. Well, you've told me something surprising. Do you want to hear something surprising from me? Go on, then. I was in a union once and I went on strike. Good. I was in the National Union of Journalists and went on strike against Richard Desmond's pay cut. And I was a little...

3:13My union life, my life in the union didn't last long because whereas I went on the picket line with signs and things, with the mother of the chapel then, Michelle Stanisth Street, and a couple of others. General Secretary, yeah. Indeed. Nobody else came out. They all just work from home. And I thought, this isn't collectivism. That's not the way it works. No. So you've either got to go out and do your thing. If you voted to strike, you physically strike or you don't. I thought... Absolutely. But that's the advantage of the railway. It's a very physical thing. That's true. And we'll get on to strike action and public sector pay and all the rest of it in just a minute.

3:45But can we talk about the Labour leadership? Because quite a few unions last week came out against Keir Starmer, basically saying, look, we don't support you anymore. Did they ever? I don't know, Mick. Well, we were always worried about Keir Starmer because we were on strike, as many of your viewers and listeners will know, under the last legs of the Tory government when Grant Shapps was the transport minister for a few weeks and a few months and there was a roundabout of people coming in and out of the job. So all through the dog days of the last Tory government, we were in that big dispute, which I'm not going to go back into, but we were in it.

4:23And unions were getting a bit itchy about Starmer because he's a nice guy, apparently. I've met him a couple of times very briefly. But he doesn't seem to believe in anything. And I think it doesn't matter what side you're on in politics, you have to have a backbone of belief in some principal things. Even if you can't achieve those principles, you have to believe in something. And it's quite hard to pin down what Keir Starmer is. So for Labour movement people, and most unions aren't affiliated to Labour, they want to know what you actually believe in. So for me, it's things like very pragmatic things like council housing rather than social housing, as they call it.

5:03I want councils to be able to build houses or properties and homes. I believe in a bit of public ownership. Yes. Now, that doesn't mean I want to nationalise the whole economy, but I do believe the state has got to intervene. And water and railways has been one that many people can see both sides of the argument on that. Not everyone supports it, but you'd expect a Labour politician to say, yeah, I believe in these five things, whatever they are. Yes. You know, poverty, the abolition of poverty is a big one for us. It's an obvious one, isn't it? Yeah, and he doesn't seem to ever say that. And we were saying in the run-up in speeches I was making, come on, Keir, tell us what you believe in, because actual policies and actions in government are all blown off course anyway.

5:47You can write down in a big manifesto, I'm going to do about A, B, C and D, but as we've seen over the last few months, that can get blown out by things you've never thought of and, you know, as Macmillan famously said, events. Events, dear boy. And your policy doesn't, your actual detailed policy doesn't normally stand the test of time, whereas your beliefs should be with you, modified, of course, occasionally, but they should be with you the whole time. So I didn't think Starmer would last the course, if I'm honest with you. And you were right. Well, to be fair, he's still clinging on, but it's looking terminal.

6:20Lord Glassman, the Labour peer, describes Keir Starmer as lanyard class and he doubts whether he fulfils his self-styled working-class credentials. He's constantly banging on about being the son of a toolmaker. OK, fair enough. Do you regard him to be working-class, Mick? Well, I think he's working-class origins, but once you're in power, you're probably not... If you're running the government, you're probably not working-class. I believe most people are working-class. If you don't own... Am I working-class? Yeah, if you don't own the means of production, maybe you do. I don't know, maybe you've got a share in this organisation.

6:53I don't own this company, sadly not, no. But if you're not in ownership or control of the means of production, you are working class. If you have to get up when the alarm clock rings and go out and do a job and you depend on your earnings rather than your assets for your lifestyle or just for your existence in many people's cases, you are working class. So it doesn't matter whether you're blue-collar or white-collar. Not to me, no, and it's not manners or accent. It's where you are in the economic system that makes you working class. Now, lots of people don't like that. And I don't go along with this, it's a massive badge of pride to be working class.

7:28We all have to go to work. And everybody should be able to go to work and should go to work when they get the opportunity. I'm quite old-fashioned like that. Yes, well, we agree on that then, Nick. I believe in the dignity of labour, well-paid labour, hopefully, in most cases. But do you know who you're sounding like a little bit? Nigel Farage, who keeps on banging on about Alarm Clock Britain. He's talking about people in work versus people in welfare. You'll be familiar with the slight change in tone in rhetoric among, funny enough, the working classes about those in welfare. You might have noticed a few videos popping up by bricklayers, electricians like yourself and plumbers saying, well, I get up at 5am because I've got a benefits bill to pay.

8:07Yeah, and they've been cajoled into doing that by organisations such as yours. No, no, no. Hang on, Mick. But people are on benefits. Can I just clarify something? Absolutely not. I'm talking about bricklayers and other people. Oh, they're all spontaneous, aren't they? Well, yeah, most people who are online and filming funny videos certainly aren't doing it with the say-so of the Telegraph. What I'm saying is you can have some sympathy with the position of the hard-working man or woman... I do. I was one for a very long time. ..who think their taxes may be increasingly being spent on welfare claimants.

8:38So what we've got to do is not divide people on the basis of whether they've got a job at the moment or not, whatever their identity is or where they come from, we've got to make sure that everybody gets the opportunity to get a job and it's a meaningful, well-paid job with a bit of job security so they can move off benefits. Yeah. But if you're better off on benefits... The person who had the biggest transition to benefits system in this country was, of course, Margaret Thatcher. Put the benefits bill up massively because she wanted to move people off the unemployment basis onto other welfare benefits.

9:12So politicians play tricks with that. But one of the main problems in this country, I believe, is low-paid work where businesses, and this is not a criticism of people, entrepreneurs and so on, that are running low-margin businesses, but we do have an economy where very many businesses are on tiny margins and exist solely because they're paying such low wages. And it's because those wages are so low, it's difficult to make the transition from welfare benefits to the benefits of being in work. And often it's very punishing. You get these graphs that are produced every now and again. If you do more than 16 hours or whatever the number is these days, but it has been typically 16 hours, they punish you for taking on part-time work or taking on casual work or temporary work.

9:59Now, we've got to have a system that deals with that and you've got to have some technical people that can come up with some systems that can say, I'm going to encourage you to get a job. I'm not going to punish you if that doesn't work. Now, those bricklayers and plumbers and carpenters that I used to work with would be very displeased if their sister or their children or their in-laws or their friends were taken off benefits harshly and punished just because they got an issue. So we've got to find a system that rewards work. Now, that's a very old-fashioned social democratic position that most working class people believe in.

10:37I don't believe in just having welfare for the sake of it. I believe in good jobs that are paying people a proper wage so they can survive in this economy. But in the town we're in today, being on minimum wage is no fun at all. No. And there are millions of people doing that, by the way. Well, let's talk about the minimum wage, because this week Labour have been rocked by a particular statistic. which is that youth unemployment is at an 11-year high. That could be a consequence of the minimum wage going up. For reasons that you'll know, Mick, let's use the example of my 17-year-old daughter who works in a pub.

11:13If her wages go up, then the person above her wages has to go up, the chef's wages have to go up, et cetera, et cetera. And that might make the pub, it might make it difficult for the landlord of that pub to employ as many people all on a higher salary. Therefore, the landlord turns around... Most pubs aren't run by landlords. You're living in a bit of an old-fashioned world. My local pub is. They then might turn around to my daughter or somebody on the bottom rung of the ladder, usually a 17 - or 18-year-old who are doing pot washing or whatever, and say, do you know what? Because the minimum wage has gone up, we can no longer afford to employ you, so you're gone.

11:50And the capitalist argument would be, surely it's better to have five employees on a slightly lower wage than three on a slightly higher one, simply because, to make your argument, we want more people in work, not least young people. And many people working on minimum wage and working on living wage, as it is in London in some cases, are working for mega corporations. So if you take, I'll give you a company at random that we used to do with, Mighty, that does cleaning all over and services, maybe even in this building, certainly in Victoria Station out there, is a mega company where the chief executive if he's paid£5 million a year, he won't move people off the minimum wage because of these arguments.

12:31Well, he will if it's government mandated. But he'll still keep people off on the minimum wage. He won't pay more because all these contracts are based on undercutting each other. And the only way to ensure that there isn't constant undercutting and actually a lowering of wages, which is what we faced in the 80s before Blair brought in the minimum wage, was a constant decline in earnings for lower paid people and people outside big institutions. So you've got to get the balance right. I don't accept that all of the costs on businesses and all of the reasons that they're making people unemployed or not hiring are down to the very poor minimum wage that we have.

13:10OK. Because you can't survive on a minimum wage in London. So say if you took quite a socialist standpoint, say a policy that's adopted by the Green Party, which is to cap the highest earnings in any company, Surely if you're going to say that no CEO should earn over, let's just plug a figure out of the sky, a million, shouldn't you also apply that to the lower rungs of the ladder and say that actually a cleaner of Victoria Station should never earn more than X proportionately? Who's the X? Well, I'm saying never earn more than X amount. Why would you say that? Because half the time they want them to do loads of overtime.

13:46Should a cleaner at Victoria Station earn£100 ,000 a year? Well, if they could earn it, they could. But they won't be able to, will they, Mick? For me, these sorts of arguments about chief executives' salaries are irrelevant because they'll get round it anyway. But they're suggesting 10 to 1 ratios. Yeah, but that's just symbolic. It doesn't change the nature of the system. Do you not support that policy then? I just don't think it's a relevant policy. I think it's a symbolic policy. I believe in pragmatic, solution-based policy. If we're going to be pragmatists and we're going to be realists rather than idealists, isn't it right to suggest that there's only so much a cleaner will ever earn in the same way that there's only so much a railway worker will ever earn.

14:27Well, we accept that. We accept that the wages are there to be negotiated. Of course, the minimum wage isn't negotiated. It's set by committee people in one way or another. It's set by the government ultimately, but there's advisors that come into that. And it doesn't always go up in the way it's gone. The reason it's gone up lately is because it was so low before. So the steps have had to be bigger to keep up. with its previous value. So most people, there hasn't been a wage price spiral, as people keep telling us. Wages were actually in decline for quite a long time, and the minimum wage has had to catch up lately because it was so far behind.

15:03But public sector pay has gone up, hasn't it? It went down for a very long time. Okay, but I think the counter-narrative... You forget about George Osborne, who capped public sector pay at zero or 1 % for a very, very long time. And if you take people like the armed forces and the police, the reason they couldn't get people into the armed forces, and my union's section of the defence forces, the Royal Fleet Auxiliary, they cannot get anyone to join them because the wages are so poor for skilled, highly committed jobs. And that's down to previous caps on public sector pay. We spoke to a military chief recently who said actually army recruitment was up.

15:45The difference between your profession and indeed your union profession and indeed the army is, of course, they're banned from going on strike. Yeah, but when I was in negotiating with the MOD in the Lord Admiral's office on the Royal Fleet Auxiliary Pay, I made the argument for sailors and soldiers and aircraft people to get a proper rise. But notwithstanding your point about the austerity... But they were suppressed for so long. That's my point. OK, so wages are suppressed for so long, but subsequently they go up and they continue to go up. The counter-strike argument is as follows. Public sector pay has never been higher.

16:23Conditions have never been better. It's never been higher compared to what? You've now got an employee rights bill that entrenches more workers' rights into legislation. And yet, despite all this, you continue to go on strike, threaten strike action. When does it ever end? I mean, you must admit now. It ends when you get agreements to the dispute that you're involved in. You must admit now that a rail worker today in 2026 has made leaps and bounds compared to the 70s and 80s. The rail workers out in Victoria Station who clean it will be on the minimum wage. OK. But the recent strikes haven't been about them, have they?

16:59They've been about drivers and station staff. The ones with network rail and the train operating companies were generally about those kinds of staff. Yes. But the average wage, the average salary during that dispute was around£35 ,000, despite what people at the Telegraph and the right-wing media were saying. Hang on, let's just look at the pay that RMT members particularly have seen since 2023. We've got 9 % over two years. Some lowest paid workers reportedly seeing increases of up to 14.4%. We've had a 4.75 % backdated rise. Another 4.5 % rise. This is in 2024. Network rail staff have separately secured 4.5%.

17:43Then we look to London Overground. You're a great advert for our union. 6.5%. So what I think the public, the hard-working commuter, because let's be honest, commuters are workers too. They might not be on to unions, but they've got their own rights. They'll see, with great relief this week, the tube strike being cancelled. Thank goodness I'm not going to be grotesquely inconvenienced and held to ransom by tube drivers and others. You're not being held to ransom. Well, you are if you can't use a tube. It's a bit of a cliché. Nobody's told you to ransom, are they? Well, that's... I'm talking about...

18:10They're exercising a human right to withdraw their labour. It might be a cliché. That's how people feel that they are treated by rail workers. It's people like The Telegraph that keep perpetuating this cliché. It is a freedom. We don't perpetuate it. We just reflect what our readers, listeners and viewers think. And they think, hang on a minute, we've now got tube drivers earning almost 80 grand a year. We've had all of these public sector pay rises. What's wrong with a tube driver earning that money? Well, why doesn't a bus driver earn that money? Exactly. Because they're not unionised, I suppose.

18:37Well, they are unionised. They don't hold the country to ransom as rail workers do. Well, there's been plenty of bus strikes over the last two or three years. But they'll say, hang on a minute, pay is well up, conditions are much improved, we've also got it enshrined in legislation, why are you still all going on strike every five minutes? Well, we're not going on strike every five minutes. It feels like that. No. Why are you regularly still striking? when, as you yourself have said, you've secured all these pay rises now. When we have a dispute with an employer, we have to go through an enormous set of loops and hurdles to get through the legislation, which is still largely the Tory legislation that has been in since 1981, Tebbitt's law and all the successive pieces of legislation.

19:20All right, you've got Rayner's law now, but go on. Well, it doesn't really affect the strike legislation too much. It improves the rights of workers, doesn't it? Yeah, but not really the strike legislation. It's pretty much the same as it was before. There's a few bits of tinkering around the edges. But anyway, record high pay and record good conditions and still strikes. Most people's pay in absolute terms is at a record high because it's higher than it was in 1874. They're not record high rates of pay compared to where the economy's gone. Right. And hardly any of those pay deals that you mentioned were above the prevailing rate of inflation.

19:55So the settlement... Quite hard to have... The settlement... High inflation-linked pay rises when inflation goes completely bonkers during COVID and beyond. Is it 12 %? The settlement that we achieved at the end of the dispute, which was a three-year deal in all, because we hadn't had a pay rise for three years, there was no pay at all, was in total about 15.1%. That's over three years. Better than a private sector worker we get, Mick, I'd imagine. The inflation rate was 28%. So we were about half... Do you agree that that's an unrealistic inflation rate? Sector workers need to be organised into efficient and effective trade unions so that they're organised so that they get a decent set of terms and conditions and pay.

20:36But just in answer to the question then, when you make these pay, you settle these pay disputes and you get the pay rise you want and indeed you insist on better conditions and you get it. We get a pay rise, we can agree. You just keep on striking anyway. We don't. We haven't had a strike on Network Rail or the train operating company since that dispute when I retired. Okay. So we can expect no more strikes on the main railways then because we've managed to... It depends what the main railways do. Well, the other example, I suppose, the classic example would be junior stroke resident, as they like to be called, doctors.

21:09You know, they settle a pay claim and then they still go on strike and threaten more strike action afterwards. You can understand... Well, they settled a pay claim and then there was the subsequent years. OK, but you can see the public's frustration. Hang on, haven't we just given them a record-breaking pay claim? And still they're not in hospitals. The public will be more frustrated when people leave the profession and go to Australia and New Zealand and Canada, which is where many, many of them are going right now. Yeah, because they tax too much, right? Because of socialism. Oh, we haven't got socialism.

21:40The tax isn't... We've got more socialism now than we did, Mick. No, we don't. I mean, maybe that's the reason they're going to Australia. It's the prevailing rate of pay and the conditions under which they have to work. That's the ones I speak to. I know people that have gone personally know them. They say that there's too much pressure on them here and for what they get, they could get more elsewhere. But why then in 2024 was that deal accepted by 66 % of members? Junior doctors were offered 22.3%. That's for the deal that was due at that time. I just feel like the goalposts are constantly shifting.

22:16Is it just the union way that at the end of the day you exist to threaten industrial action in order to get your workers more money, regardless of whether they've already been given a load of money. Papers like The Telegraph existed seemingly to pump out these clichés that unions cause trouble, that union leadership are barons. Can I just say, sometimes clichés are clichés. It's because everybody believes them on one side of the argument. No, it's because you keep repeating them. But can't you just answer this kind of never-ending industrial action modus operandi? We have some of the lowest levels of industrial action in this country than we've ever had.

22:52Really? Just in the British context. And why do you think that is? Because successive governments have given public sector workers more pay. No, it's because of the anti-trade union laws and union membership is lower than it once was. Would you rather more strikes? When union membership was higher, workers' pay relative to the rest of the economy was higher and there was greater levels of equality in this country. Now, I'd rather not have any strikes. Really? Absolutely. I'd rather that we ran the economy and ran society in a way where we didn't need strikes. Yes. But it doesn't work like that at the moment.

23:26Because you'd think that employers don't ever do anything wrong in your world and that governments don't ever do anything wrong. Hang on a minute, Mick Lynch. Didn't I just tell you that when I was working under Richard Desmond, I went on strike. Subsequently, Reach took over Express newspapers and things became even worse, even though by then they were publishing probably your second favourite newspaper after the Morning Star, The Daily Mirror. But that's another story. No, I appreciate that employers can take staff for a ride. And I believe that workers should be remunerated. I also believe that they should be remunerated attractively to get them into work and not to be reliant on benefits.

24:06We agree on all that. I'm merely making the point that the perception is that actually public sector pay, is now much better than it was, that conditions are much better than they were, not least after Angela Rayner's Employees' Rights Bill. And therefore, if you're just trying to do a day's work on a tube and you see that yet again strike action is looming and you know that train drivers are now earning 80 grand, you're scratching your head thinking, what's this all about? Why? What more do you want? We don't only represent train drivers, for starters. We represent everybody on the railway and many of them are very modestly paid and some of them are quite low paid.

24:45Much of the action we take is to try and ensure that we bring those people with us and not just allow the employers to pick out certain grades in certain sectors and pay them at a disadvantage to others. So we're quite proud of the work we do. I'm quite proud of the way we stood up in that recent dispute over things that weren't to do with pay because we were constantly saying that this government intends to close every ticket office, intends to make ghost towns of big railway stations and local stations. And we got a lot of support on our ticket office campaign in the shires and in the towns.

25:18I think people want to physically see someone at the station. Absolutely. I agree with you. We want to return to a human-faced society and a human-faced economy and the services that we work on and have to use because they're essential services are staffed and are friendly and feel like a safe, positive place to be. Now many places are, I was just out in Victoria Station there, it's quite calm, everything's running on time and people seemed happy, it was just a vibe in the place. But it can turn to a stressful situation for all sorts of reasons and that's when you need the staff.

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28:08Why then did you grimace when I mentioned Farage? He wants to renationalise steel. He's got kind of J.D. Vancean policies about kind of restoring the British equivalent of the Rust Belt America. He's quite interested in the idea of the worker taking precedence, and he said that a lot. He's talked, as I said earlier, about Alarm Clock Britain. He's pro-drilling in the North Sea. And let's be honest, you do have members because they've come up to me at shock horror Labour conferences and say, thank you to the Telegraph for standing up for the workers who are drilling for oil and gas. And I've said, OK, fine.

28:46You know, that's a funny situation to be in, Nick. Yeah, but those politicians on the right of society didn't do anything about the transition when the North Sea was closing to get those people into jobs where they could work on the new technology and the new energy formats. Our position is simple. We think carbon is going to fade out eventually just because of natural causes, if you like. You have to plan for that. So you need a mixed, a balance of energy sources. The question of whether there's new drilling in the North Sea is not going to resolve the issues that are around in the immediate present time.

29:23You won't get any reduction in petrol prices or energy prices if you started to give out new licences tomorrow. Now, I'm not on top of all the politics of that, but I know that it won't resolve it immediately. So we've got members that work in the alternative energy section on the wind farms and so on, and we've got members who work out on the rigs on the North Sea and work all around the world. We represent all the deep-sea divers and welders that work on oil and gas all over the world. We want to see those people have a future, but we also want to see the planet being looked after. I think you can do that without the hysteria that is somehow pumped up in some sections of the media.

30:02You've got to take a very pragmatic approach. We need energy security, which means producing it on the UK surface, on the UK seabed and everywhere else. I think that can be done if we just take the long-term view and stop frothing at the mouth every time somebody offers a fairly straightforward, pragmatic approach to energy supply. I mean, I think there seems to be something nonsensical about the announcement this week that we're sanctioning our own oil and gas because we're not issuing more licences, and then we're taking it from Russia. Your members will think that's bonkers. They're following in the steps of Donald Trump for some reason, who did exactly the same thing two weeks before.

30:44So back to your question about Farage. I don't trust Farage at all. I think he's going to unleash a torrent of racism and a torrent of division, which will put our society and our country into the dark ages if he achieves power. The voters don't agree with you, though, do they? In northern heartlands that have just all been turned turquoise. And if you look, we've done the polling at the TUC, extensive polling amongst those working class constituents, constituents and constituencies. All of the values that they have, apart from the stuff on immigration and those types of issues, are all what you would call old labour issues.

31:24They want a tax and spend chancellor, they want public services in public ownership, and they want this country to have an industrial plan. What we've lacked since Margaret Thatcher is an industrial plan for this country. We've turned it into an offshore financial economy which doesn't help working-class people who need to work with their hands and need to work in the manual economy. We've destroyed that, and the Conservative Party and Blair sent these jobs to the Far East. They did it deliberately as a plan. Now, Nigel Farage... I'm glad you've acknowledged that Blair and Brown doubled down on this.

32:02Absolutely. There were a few moments for Thatcher. Gordon Brown privatised the tube. There's the Nissan plant in Sunderland. There's the sale of council homes, which gave people a generational inheritance. But Mick, let's not re-legislate. The sale of council homes is one of the biggest disasters in this country's history. Not according to those who bought them? Yes, they could have been allowed to buy them. But what did Thatcher do with the money? She said it cannot be used to build houses. And what then happened was that the ratepayer was subsidised through the sale of council houses. We've got a crisis in housing because we haven't got a balanced economy in housing.

32:37We should have house buyers and holders. We should have a small private rented sector for the fluidity that you need in the economy. And we should have a large municipal owned council housing sector, which would give income over 100 years to councils and would give a supply of housing that would be beneficial to many people. Exporting our manufacturing base to the Far East. I agree. That's true. It was, well, she was doing what Western Europe and North America were doing at the same time, right? It became cheaper to make things in China. Yeah, but the one that did it here was Thatcher. OK, that's fine, Mick, and I appreciate that.

33:12But the other big elephant in the room here that you're not addressing is mass migration since 1997. Now, the so-called indigenous British worker... Why do I have to address it? Well, I think you do, because I think the indigenous British worker might argue that it was a problem... So this is a capitalist mechanism. Mass migration... It was a problem that people came in and undercut their wages... Mass migration... And, by the way, leapfrogged them on housing lists. Mass migration is a mechanism of the capitalist economy in the UK. Do you agree with mass migration? It's a natural facet of what's been going on.

33:44But did it go too far? Well, you'd have to ask George Osborne and David Cameron, who introduced this policy. Blair started it, didn't he? Well, Blair had a policy about migration that was a successor to the single market economy. Well, net migration into the UK before Blair took power. Who brought us into the single market? 25 ,000. Who brought us into the single market? Five years afterwards, seven million, Mick. So you telling me your members don't feel that immigration has failed in some aspects? Who brought us into the single market and the four freedoms, including the Free Movement of Labour, the Conservative Party, and the Maastricht Treaty, and all of the single market...

34:20We've agreed Blair and Brown double down on this. ...was a Thatcherite policy. OK. And it was delivered. Now, hang on. Yeah, go on. I don't believe in blaming people who've migrated to this country, including my parents, to seek a better life. From Ireland, to clarify. During the war, yeah. During the war. Sure. And have given a family of five an opportunity, right? I don't believe in blaming people because they're serving the economy that capitalism has dictated in this country. It's the capitalist economy that has demanded this labour, much of which is the low-wage economy. Exactly. The capitalist economy also emptied.

35:00Mass migration could have driven wages down. The capitalist economy has also emptied the factories and mills of this country. Has mass migration driven wages down in this country? Well, we'll have to see. I don't know. Have you got the facts and figures? Well, I think it's been suggested that it has. Well, who's suggesting it? Well, you could ask, for instance... Who's suggesting it? You could ask, for instance, a British builder back in the noughties whether they were being undercut by Romanians and Polish people. When we tried to regulate that... And they would say, Mick, yes, we were. If you try to regulate that through trade union negotiation and trade union action, you decry it.

35:34Because we don't ask people what colour they are or where they've come from. I remember working on building sites in the 80s in London where London workers were saying, we shouldn't allow these northerners onto our sites. Sure. But then the other problem has been... We shouldn't allow Geordies and Scotch people and people and scouters. You've cited your hard-working parents. Don't you think that there is an argument to suggest that when it comes to immigration policy, one must favouritise quality over quantity, that if people come here and make a contribution... I'm not going down the road that the Telegraph...

36:04But if they come to this country and they aren't working and they're taking from the state rather than contributing, that's a problem for working people. ..to become a fully signed-up affiliate of reform. No. And all of the racism and disunity that's going to cause... This isn't the racist... What I see coming out of the Telegraph every day... Mick, Mick. ..is making space for racism. No, absolutely not. Because, funny enough, many Telegraph readers... Racism is in the eye of the beholder. No, no, because I think you're bigger than that, Mick. I think reaching for the racism lever, when somebody suggests that perhaps mass migration did contribute to a lowering of unskilled workers' wages and, indeed, put more people on housing lists that might have challenged those who wanted to get the council housing you've talked about...

36:51There isn't any council housing. There isn't any council housing. Mick, let me finish. Because Margaret Thatcher sold it all. Let me finish. To then sort of cry racist and bigot. Just to clarify, no, we're not affiliated with reform. You're on the way to it. Many, many readers do not support Nigel Farage. Well, my prediction is that you will support reform at the next election. All right, well, you make that prediction. You say me. I'm not in charge of this newspaper. You're representing this paper. Right. I'm representing this paper and I'm trying to push back. I think you'll be fully signed up to a reform project.

37:20When people say that perhaps mass migration into this country, particularly of low-skilled workers, may have depreciated wages and may have put extra pressure on public services. They said that in the 1840s when the Irish had to come here. Is that a racist point? I don't think it is. The Irish had to come here because of the famine created by the landlords in Ireland in the 1840s. Sure. They said that in every town in Britain, that they're undermining the wages. I think people are worried about people coming here and not making a contribution. Are you saying that people that have migrated to this country don't contribute?

37:51Some of them don't because they're not working. Well, maybe they're not able to work. OK. But you seem to be making this generalisation that migrant people, people that have emigrated over the last 50 years... Some British work and some don't. Yeah, so why do you make a distinction about them? They're either people in work or out of work. What difference does their colour or origin make? No, it doesn't make any difference. Well, you've made the distinction. No, because I made the distinction between people who come here and make a contribution to the economy and society... What about people who are born here that don't make a contribution to society?

38:22Well, I have the same concerns about them. So why make a distinction? Because you and I started this podcast talking about people who worked and made a contribution. So why do you make a distinction based on people's origins? Because I'm saying that we've had a mass influx of people in the millions to this country. It's put pressure on housing lists and public services. And therefore it's put pressure on the economy because we need more people in the public sector to cope with that. If a person such as you, an educated person, erudite, chooses to make a distinction about people on the basis of their ethnic or national origin, I would say that you're on the path to racism.

39:02No, I'm making a distinction about them. Which is what Farage does. No, no, you're misunderstanding me. I'm making an assessment of both Indigenous Brits, if we can call them that, and indeed immigrants. I don't know what an Indigenous Brit is. Well, it's somebody who's born in Britain. Am I an Indigenous Brit? Were you born in Britain or Ireland? I was born in Britain. OK, so you're an Indigenous British. Yeah, that's, I mean, a British-born person, Mick, versus a foreign-born person. I'm trying to say... So it's foreigners you're talking about, then? I'm talking about those who make a contribution.

39:31So foreigners are somehow different to British people. No, Mick, I don't know why you're going down this bizarre line of... It's your line that's bizarre. No, you've reached... You choose to make distinctions about people based on their origins. No, Mick, I'm sorry. This is actually getting slightly preposterous. You've reached for the, because I don't agree with you, because you're on the right, you're a racist and a bigot. And I'm saying that's not the point I'm trying to make. I'm actually trying to align with the point you made at the very beginning of this Daily Tea, which is that we want to see as many people in work as possible.

40:01So I'm saying that in order to... And we don't want to distinguish based on their background or ethnicity. But I'm not. I'm saying we need to distinguish people as to the contribution that we need to encourage them to make to the economy. What would you do if somebody... a non-contribution that could be a drag on the state that taxpayers, workers have to pay for. That's why the tax burden's gone up, Mick. Let me ask you this. Would you rather workers paid more tax or less? Let's address your point. As we're doing socialism versus capitalism. We needed to pay the right tax for the services. Or good versus evil.

40:35Or racist versus non-racist, weirdly. We need to pay the right tax to run the services that we decide we want. What is the right tax? I don't know. It depends on the services. Tax burden's at an all-time high. It's nearly in the 40s. Should it be in the 30 percent? If an indigenous person, as you called them, an indigenous British person, loses their job and has to go on unemployment benefit compared to a foreigner, do you do something about that foreigner that is different to your indigenous person? I think people who need benefits, who cannot work. But you made a distinction about indigenous.

41:08Do you want me to answer the question? Well, you've been talking over me. Well, we're having a discussion here. Let me answer that question. I think if somebody genuinely needs employment benefit because for some reason they cannot work due to a physical or mental health problem that is so substantial it prevents them from doing a day's work. Well, that's a different thing because they're getting employment benefit, but you were talking about sick there, I think. All benefits. Well, there are two distinctions out there. There is sick benefit and there is indeed employment benefit. So if you've got a sick, non-Indigenous person, what do you do with them?

41:38If you've got a sick, non-Indigenous person, I have no problem at all if they have the right to claim benefits, to claim benefits. You don't get benefits you haven't got the right to. But I'm making an economic argument here, Mick. It's nothing to do with the race of the person. I'm asking... Well, you were the one that brought this in. Because you haven't answered the question. You've brought in this point that somehow people are different. Can you answer this following question without pointing racist and bigot and suggesting that I am somehow the incarnation of Nigel Farage? It's a really simple question.

42:07I think you're a fellow traveller. Of Nigel Farage. Don't know me very well then, Mick. Well, I've seen your paper. Right, OK. But I'm not lying. Pumping out Farage and reform stuff every day. I'm actually described more like a Kemi fangirl than a Nigel one. OK. But there you have it. Well, she'll go that way as well eventually when she needs a coalition. I'm not sure about that. I don't think she'll be the one. I think it'll be Farage needing the coalition. But I just asked you a couple of questions just about mass migration. Did you think it had depressed low-skilled wages? And did you think it had put pressure on public services?

42:38That was it. No, I think companies depress wages. Really? Yes. Because companies pay the wages. Yes. So they're the ones that suppress wages. But you don't think that wages get suppressed if people come in offering their services at a cut price? Well, they're not wages, are they? They're services, that self-employment you're talking about. But if people say... But wages from companies... If somebody said, I'll build you a brick wall for 400 quid and somebody says, I'll do it for 200 quid. Well, maybe you've got to look at the quality of that. It's up to the client. I feel like you're circumnavigating my questions.

43:08It's up to the client what they engage on. Final question, Nick. Now, most of these people that engage in these services at these cut prices would have been your Indigenous British person. OK, I don't know why you've got a problem. Indigenous is just another word for born in. But I'm surprised you brought it up. Well... Because it's quite a strange thing to say about people, to classify them as either Indigenous or foreign, which is a distinction you made. Well, should I have said British or foreign? I don't know. I don't know why you're so... Because we were talking about immigration. I don't know why you're so off on people's origins and where they've come from to make a distinction about them.

43:41It wasn't about the effect of mass migration into this country since 1997. Final question. You were worried at the beginning, or you said you were always worried about Starmer's lack of ideological grounding. Are you convinced that Andy Burnham has got an ideology? Well, it's not ideology. It's principles is what I mean. I'm not a person who's got an ideology. It's what they believe in, their beliefs. Do you think he has principles? I think he's got some principles that are more attractive. The things he's been saying in the last few weeks and since I've known him about public ownership and about the way services are run, the way the economy's run, investment and getting an industrial strategy in this country are very positive things.

44:20I've never heard that from Starmer or Reeves or anyone on that side of the Labour Party. So do you think he's the pick of the bunch when it comes to being the Labour leader and the Prime Minister of the future? From what I've seen, yeah. Mick Lynch. It's been feisty, hasn't it? I've enjoyed it. Peppery. Peppery. Put a whole load of chilli sauce on that. Thank you for coming on the Daily Tea. We hope that your association with The Telegraph on this one day, in this one hour, doesn't taint you with your union fellows, your comrades, and thank you very much. Thank you. Cheers.

45:18We'll be right back.

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