Mick Lynch, you’re a legend – and the unapologetic working-class leader the left is missing | Polly Smythe

Mick Lynch is the trade union icon who nearly wasn’t. Leaving school at 16 to train as an apprentice electrician, he worked in construction until being blacklisted for his union activities. Unable to find work in the building trade, in 1993 he took a job at Eurostar and became involved with the RMT. Construction’s loss was to be the labour movement’s gain.

Lynch was elected general secretary of RMT in 2021, and a year later, the UK’s first national railway strike since 1989 catapulted him into the public eye. He quickly became the face of a revitalised trade union movement. More than that, to his supporters – like those who bought T-shirts with his face on them – he became the combative, unapologetic working-class leader the left has been missing.

On Thursday, Lynch announced his retirement, leaving the task of representing the transport union’s 80,000 members to someone new. His popularity is in no small part because he has been a fighter. “This union has been through a lot of struggles in recent years,” he said in his retirement announcement. “I believe that it has only made it stronger, despite all the odds.”

In his short tenure, those struggles have been constant. There was the sacking by P&O Ferries of 786 UK seafarers via Zoom, before “handcuff-trained security, some wearing balaclavas” marched the crew off the ship. The union fought a campaign against ticket office closures in England that forced the Tory government into a U-turn, and is now fighting a similar battle in Scotland. Less well known but equally vital has been the union’s struggle to end outsourcing across the rail network, which saw cleaners out on strike throughout 2022.

Under Lynch’s stewardship, the RMT was instrumental in the fight against Tory minimum service levels regulations, which sought to severely restrict strike action in the public sector. Labour has now repealed these regulations, scrapping them before they’d ever been used. Their rapid disappearance can make it easy to forget that they posed an existential threat to workers’ rights. “Meek compliance with this legislation,” Lynch warned, would be “the road to oblivion for this movement.”

And then there’s the national rail dispute itself, which Lynch called a “wholesale attack on the rail industry” by the Tory government. It ended after a year, with a settlement that he admitted was “not a great deal”, but one that he argued was the best that his members could hope for, in strained circumstances.

Lynch would be the first to say that his job was to be accountable to RMT members, not journalists, but his persuasive, candid argumentative style won him acolytes far beyond transport workers. Explaining his union’s industrial disputes in the media, he was routinely faced with broadcasters and MPs who could barely conceal their contempt. Never fazed, Lynch calmly dismantled TV and radio pundits one by one, often making his case explicitly in terms of class conflict. “I want a settlement to this dispute,” he told then Conservative MP Jonathan Gullis. “I can’t do that with a backbench MP who’s just learned it off a script.”

When confronted with Piers Morgan’s fixation on why Lynch had the bald Thunderbirds villain The Hood as his Facebook profile picture, he shot back: “Is that the level we’re at? Don’t you want to talk about the issues rather than a little vinyl puppet from the 1960s?” He called junior minister Chris Philp a liar on air 15 times, told Good Morning Britain’s Richard Madeley that he was talking “remarkable twaddle”, and asked Kay Burley if a perfectly jovial picket line outside Euston station “looks like the miners’ strike?”.

It was these interviews that established Lynch’s position as that rare thing: a prominent, popular leftwing leader. And in turning daft questions on their head, he was able to upend their basic premises: why should his members have to accept below-inflation pay settlements? Why do we hear endlessly from “ordinary people” inconvenienced by strike action, but not the ordinary people striking for decent pay and conditions? Why is poverty only wrong until workers decide to do something about it?

When responding to disingenuous pundits and interviewers, Lynch consistently set out core trade union principles: that the workplace is a critical site of struggle, that organised labour can and should be political and that if you’re not bargaining, you’re begging. To people of an older generation, those principles might seem obvious. But for young people, having a general secretary speaking like this did crucial work to demystify why trade unions exist, and what they can achieve.

It’s important not to overstate the impact of one man in a movement founded on collective action; and after all, he only represented a small portion of Britain’s workforce. But I was struck by a waitress I met who, after her colleague was unfairly sacked, made tens of fake restaurant bookings for New Year’s Eve to spite her employer. When I asked her what gave her the idea, she told me: “I did it for Mick.”

When Lynch took the RMT union’s top job four years ago, I doubt he had any idea that his term would coincide with the biggest outbreak of industrial action the UK has seen since Margaret Thatcher – nor that he’d retire having gained cult status. Whenever I’ve met him, he’s struck me as someone bemused by the following he’s amassed. I’ve heard him say more than once that there are plenty of people who could do what he does. Now we’ve got the chance to see if he’s right.

• Polly Smythe is labour movement correspondent at Novara Media