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Evening Standard Comment The Tube unions new Oly
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ShareTweetRelated Articles BMW recalls battery problem cars Afghan soldier shoots Nato troops Legal block to inquest into Duggan's death Suggested TopicsTransportNuclear WeaponsBenjamin NetanyahuMiddle EastIraqDiplomacyMahmoud AhmadinejadIsraelIran08 March 2012The Olympics are an opportunity to show Britain at its best. Nothing could show London in a worse light than a transport strike during the Games.Tube unions know this, and extravagant pay demands are the result. Today we learn that RMT is considering a deal for all Tube staff, including maintenance workers and station staff cheap mlb caps, to get ?850 extra for working flexibly during the Games. Further, Tube drivers are to get bonuses of between ?850 and ?1 www.cheapcapsonline.net,200.What this amounts to is the RMT holding London to ransom. Of course drivers, as well as station staff, will have to be paid well for extra overtime worked during the Games, with Tubes running later. But these excessive deals are essentially a bribe to the unions not to embarrass London. Tube drivers can already earn ?50,000 a year; they should not have to be offered more simply for doing their jobs.Unfortunately the expectations of all transport workers were raised when the Docklands Light Railways private operators agreed to pay ?2,500 to their train captains ? who do not even drive the trains ? for the nine weeks of the Olympics and Paralympics, including a weekly ?100 attendance bonus and extraordinarily generous overtime. After that, other workers were going to follow suit.Public transport staff are going to be subjected to additional pressures during the Games because of the sheer number of visitors. But they should want the Games to succeed for the credit it reflects on London ? and many in fact do ? not because they have been bought off. Even before the drivers extra pay, the deal for all Tube workers will cost passengers and taxpayers more than ?15 million. It is a shabby arrangement which does the unions no credit.Hold fire on IranFORMER security minister Lord West Wholesale Car Racing, in an interview with this paper today, says the Prime Minister must try to persuade the US President to back away from a dangerous military attack on Iran. He is right. The threat is very real, whether it takes the form of US sanction for an Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear facilities or the less probable option of a direct US strike on Iran. With inflammatory rhetoric from both Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu on his visit to Washington this week and from would-be Republican presidential candidates, there is mounting pressure on President Obama to go beyond sanctions and diplomacy. We should use what influence we have in the other direction.Irans hardline conservative president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is a man no one would wish to see in control of nuclear weapons. He has a long record of bellicose talk against both Israel and the West, while Irans covert intervention in both Iraq and Afghanistan has resulted in the deaths of British troops. But for Iranians, the lessons of Iraq and Libya, where regimes without nuclear weapons were destroyed, are that nuclear weapons would make them safer. The way to combat that mindset is not by talking about pre-emptive strikes. The US prefers to act with its Nato partners rather than in isolation; David Cameron must make clear that on Iran, diplomacy is better than war.Pedalling eastwardsTODAY the reach of the Boris bikes has been extended east, as far as the Olympic Park, with the provision of nearly 5,000 new docking stations. The scheme has given a boost to cycling in London and become a familiar part of our streets. Now lets push the scheme southwards.TweetComments about?
