MICK LYNCH is no stranger to the sharp end of the class struggle.

The newly elected RMT general secretary was effectively starved out of the construction industry in the 1990s, a victim of the blacklisting that robbed so many decent trade unionists of their right to earn a living.

He is also a veteran of battles against the kind of right-wing gangster trade unionism that saw his former union – the notorious EETPU – kicked out of the TUC for sweetheart-dealing with some of the very bosses who were doing the blacklisting.

It was being forced out of construction that brought the west Londoner onto the railways and into RMT.

“I went into Eurostar to hide and earn some money for six months,” he says.

More than two decades on, having built Eurostar’s RMT branch from scratch to being one of the union’s biggest, and having been elected twice as assistant general secretary, he finds himself in the hot seat.

Lynch can be forgiven for wryly raising an eyebrow at the suggestion made recently by one of the Star’s down-market rivals that he is regarded in the union as a “centrist.”

“I am not a centrist,” he says with a smile. “In my community I am regarded as a radical and a leftist, but of course these things are relative.

“What I am, though, is in the mainstream of where our members are.

“They want a strong, disciplined union that is ready to fight when it’s appropriate and to use all the weapons at our disposal.

“That means professional discussions and negotiations, but it also means that you are properly organised and ready to use industrial action when the members call for it and when we need to.”

For Lynch, far more important than such labels are the struggles that will define RMT in the coming years, and he is under no illusion about the severity of the challenges facing the union and the working class in general.

“We are entering a very dangerous period, and the union has got to be ready,” he says.

Under his leadership, RMT will be “at the cutting edge of the trade union recovery,” he says, and he hopes that its example will help inspire confidence and a like-minded militancy across the movement to thwart attempts to make working people pay for the Covid crisis.

Lynch’s election campaign focused on unity and industrial organisation – the twin prerequisites he believes will allow the union to counter the aggressive agenda already being set by government and employers.

It was an approach that clearly struck a chord with members, as he won comfortably against three credible rivals, all of them also established elected officers.

“The ruling class are going to use Covid as a smokescreen for permanent changes in the workplace, and that means driving down wages, driving down conditions, attacking pensions and diluting safety,” he warns.

“On the maritime side we have already had attacks from the major ferry companies around the UK seeking to strip out terms and conditions.

“Stena Line is seeking to take away our sick pay agreement, a basic attack on an established and important condition.

“We’ve got Irish ferries now seeking to run a low-cost ferry service across the Channel which will undermine the decent agreements we have with the other providers.

“It’s a straightforward Ryanair-style attack – moving to the lowest cost-base possible, in this case using imported cheap labour, which is a direct attack on everybody’s terms and conditions.

As with the fire-and-rehire battles seen in British Gas, British Airways and increasingly elsewhere, it is a race to the bottom that must be resisted, he says.

“Offshore, the oil industry has retrenched and has enormous issues because of the carbon transfer, and we’ve got to make sure that workers have a just transition.

“We don’t want to see the offshore and onshore wind industries – our alternative energy – becoming a low cost-base, minimum-wage environment where people are vulnerable and exploited.”

But, he says, there is “a real danger” that the green economy could also be used to shoehorn gig economy terms and conditions into what should be a new engineering base for the country.

RMT members in the bus industry, too, are seeing attacks on their pay and conditions, including pay freezes, “so we will be demanding above-inflation pay rises and intend to organise our members to challenge that.”

On the railways, Lynch points to plans being introduced through the government-sponsored Rail Industry Recovery Group “to try to force the unions to buy into an agenda of cuts and what they are calling modernisation.”

“They are seeking to do that through dilution of safety standards, which will lead to fewer people on track, fewer people on trains and fewer people on our stations.”

The union has already declared that it is on a “national dispute footing” with Network Rail after it revealed that it would be seeking huge job cuts on the back of a 50 per cent reduction in safety-critical work.

Some of the many subcontractors in the industry are being pushed towards gig economy status, with its variable and tenuous engagement structures and umbrella tax companies and the like.

“There are challenges in every one of our sectors and we have got to make sure that these pillars of the union are properly represented and fully organised so that we can respond to them.

“Each of those pillars deserves the support of the others and the union as a whole, so that no sector or grade is left behind, and there isn’t a ‘Cinderella’ part of our union.

“That is what industrial trade unionism is, and it forms the very foundations of RMT.

“I am going to be focused on industrial organisation, so that we seek to fulfil our basic philosophy as an industrial union – that every worker should be in the union and that we represent every worker in all our sectors.

“That is my ambition: to grow the union and make sure that every worker is a member, every member is an activist, everyone is covered by an RMT agreement – and all are ready to support the union’s position when it comes to engaging with the employer, up to and including industrial action.”

“I think we are in a good position to make those transitions – but it won’t be a one-off: we must constantly be able to adapt to deal with whatever is in front of us, and that means all members being informed on all of the issues in front of them.”

On the political front, Lynch says he has made it clear that he will not be seeking to reaffiliate the union to the Labour Party.

“We will support the Labour Party when it does good things and we will be critical of it when it does bad things – but I am very concerned about its direction of travel.

“Clearly it is in the interests of everyone in the working class to have a strong and powerful Labour Party, even if we don’t support everything it does.”

But, he says, under its current leadership – “if that’s what you can call it” – the party has turned into “a passive blob,” and the recent election results were “an embarrassment to anyone in the labour movement.”

“On a class basis we need people who can defend our interests in the town halls, in the parish councils, and all the way through the regional and national assemblies, the new mayoralties and in Westminster,” he says.

But, he adds, the party needs to adopt some “permanent principles” – around public ownership and public housing – “not what they call ‘social housing,’ but publicly owned housing, through the councils, that gives our people affordable, high-quality homes.

“It should also defend the education system, the welfare state and the NHS and oppose privatisation and imperialist war.

“Those four or five things are permanent positions that should be on a permanent pledge card: do that, and you can build on the particulars in any period to put the detailed policies out.”

Lynch has enormous respect for his predecessor, Mick Cash, who had the difficult job of taking over the reins of the union in the wake of Bob Crow’s tragic early death in 2014.

“The union has grown significantly under Mick Cash’s tenure, and his achievements should not be forgotten.

“I am extremely grateful for his legacy, and so are the vast majority of our members.

“It has been a stressful period for the union. There are some people who didn’t agree with Mick Cash’s position, and some who just didn’t think he should be the general secretary – but the members did, and he won two elections by massive margins.”

Lynch sees his own election as a “turning point.”

“It gives us an opportunity to reset, to focus on the things that unite us, and on the vast majority of things in front of us, that are put there by the employers, the industry and by circumstance, we are agreed.

In a widely welcomed move, one of his first acts as general secretary was to place before the national executive a unity statement, which was endorsed unanimously by its members and by all the union’s officers.

“We are going to be united and we are going to take the union forward, and all pull together in the same direction,” he says.