Driving skill

London has great public transport. Trains, tubes, buses get millions of people where they want to go every day.
On Boxing Day we saw the best and worst of this.
The worst were the ASLEF train drivers who went on strike because the generous wages they get are not enough to get them out of bed on a bank holiday.
The best were the bus drivers who packed in as many of us as possible and got us to and from our sales, our football matches and our tourist sites.
Driving a Tube train is easy - so easy it can be automated. Driverless trains are operating now and will be the norm in a few years.
Driving a bus is difficult. You share the road with car drivers who don’t know which lane to be in, cyclists who wear black at night and come up the inside and pedestrians who get drunk and wander into the road.
The men and women who drive buses are, like the people who drive big trucks, skillful, calm and courteous. They are better drivers than the rest of us.
The Association of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen are not engineers or firemen. They are the skills we needed when steam trains ran. We don’t need those skills today.
Nor do we need the union belief of the 1970s that going on strike forces employers to pay higher wages.
It should be clear by now to even the locomotive engineers and firemen that going on strike forces employers to work out how to use technology to replace you.