HOWEVER it ultimately ends, the national railway strike led by the RMT has proved a social and political landmark. 

Its significance does not lie solely in stopping the trains running for three days. The privatised industry can do that unaided, and with great loss of life, as anyone who remembers the Hatfield disaster of 2000 can attest. 

No, its importance is as a reassertion of working-class authority and values, a reassertion both practical and symbolic. 

The strike was a reminder, as RMT assistant general secretary Eddie Dempsey said, that pretty much nothing is done in society if working-class people stop doing it. Always a lesson worth repeating. 

But it has also been the occasion for a broader reassertion of working-class pride. That pride was fairly normal in the 1970s, but has become much rarer in the post-Thatcher years. 

The working-class has been written out of any positive social narrative. “Left behind,” as it were. Some of the left has been infected too, and cast around for alternative social agents to drive progress. 

Yet the RMT, exemplified in the brilliant media turns of its general secretary Mick Lynch, has sent a different message. Here is a working-class man who most of the country had never heard of 10 days ago running rings around the anointed of the mass media. Who knew such a thing could occur? 

Many people think Lynch is not just an effective strike leader but could make a better fist of running the country, although admittedly the competition is not exacting right now. But he articulates what millions are thinking and the dictatorship of the proletariat could do with extending beyond 90-second cameos in the TV studios.

The number of people seeking to join unions has rocketed, if Google searches account for anything. Indeed, the 40,000 RMT members on strike are only a small fraction of the workers facing massive pay cuts. 

The difference is that the railways are union organised. And RMT is not just militant, but also a firm supporter of socialist politics. That is the combination which leads to the reconstitution of the working class as a serious alternative to the social order, itself the prerequisite for any serious discussion of socialism. 

Obviously, this alarms the Tories. Gormless Grant Shapps refuses to get involved in the dispute while conducting a running anti-union commentary, as if he worked for the Daily Telegraph rather than being the actual transport secretary. 

As ever, the Conservatives reach for further anti-union laws. Dogs, vomit. This time they aim to give every employer the right to hire agency strike-breakers, the very behaviour they faked condemnation of when P&O sacked its workforce earlier this year. 

But if working-class solidarity worries the government, it absolutely terrifies the Labour leadership. In the latest breach of his election pledges Keir Starmer has gone from “standing shoulder to shoulder” with unions to running a mile. 

It is good that a few dozen Labour MPs defied his ban on showing any solidarity with RMT. But it is scandalous that the majority of the spineless Parliamentary Labour Party seem to have gone along with it. 

Hopefully no Labour MP failing to offer support for the RMT will receive any union funding going forward. 

A rising tide of working-class struggle in defence of living standards and basic rights spells doom for Starmer’s elite-compliant politics. Unlike Corbynism, Starmerism has absolutely nothing to say that is remotely relevant. 

That the strike enjoys huge public sympathy matter nothing to Starmer or his sidekick David Lammy. Their audience is the Establishment, their only desire its approval. 

The first priority is to ensure a successful outcome to the RMT’s action. The second is to see the struggle broadened to other sections of beleaguered workers. But on the way, we should not neglect the importance of ditching Starmer. 

Then, the working class will truly stand a head taller. 

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YOUNG COMMUNISTS attending the TUC’s “We Demand Better” demonstration were demanding more than better. Some chanted “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara, Stalin” as they marched. This has upset the people one would anticipate being upset. 

The critics are disturbed by the last name in the chant, of course. Ho and Che are still suitable for T-shirts, and can be invoked in polite company. Stalin, not so much. 

In the context of a mass labour movement demonstration, my own view would tend towards John Lennon’s. The Beatle sagely advised that “if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain’t going to make it with anyone anyhow.” 

So, time and a place. However, if there is to be a debate on the Soviet leader, let’s start with Che: “In the so-called mistakes of Stalin lies the difference between a revolutionary attitude and a revisionist attitude. 

“You have to look at Stalin in the historical context in which he moves, you don’t have to look at him as some kind of brute, but in that particular historical context. I have come to communism because of daddy Stalin and nobody must come and tell me that I mustn’t read Stalin.” 

As for Ho Chi Minh, when Vietnamese party cadre gathered in a remote region for a conference in 1948, he named their location Mount Stalin.  When he later met Stalin he asked for an autograph. 

Perhaps all this tells us is that Ho and Che remained young Communists at heart. However, “Ho and Che good, Stalin bad” is not a view they would have remotely understood. 

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BORIS JOHNSON loves playing Churchill. So let me commend his predecessor’s handling of a railway strike when premier. Biographer Andrew Roberts recounts the exchange between Churchill and Rab Butler, chancellor of the Exchequer: “Churchill phoned Butler to boast that he had averted a threatened Christmas rail strike in 1954. Not unnaturally, the chancellor asked on whose terms the dispute had been settled? ‘Theirs, old cock!’ came the prime minister’s breezy reply.” 

Time for Johnson to find his inner Churchill.