RAIL UNION leader Mick Lynch has a simple story to tell and he tells it with a disarming frankness that has left a half-dozen media personalities and Tory politicians wondering why they cannot lay a glove on him.

Railway bosses are paid millions in salaries and fringe benefits and the private owners of train-operating companies have plundered millions in profits on the backs of railway workers whose wages are increasingly unable to meet their living costs.

These things are transparently true and the combined efforts of the government and the monopoly media are unable to significantly shift the common-sense understanding of the British people that railway workers need a pay rise that offsets the murderous rise in living costs that has followed on a decade of pay restraint.