Mick Lynch's Clipping War Victory in the 2022/3 Rail Strikes - Reflections.

Lessons that the mainstream parties need to learn.

As long as I can remember, the moment the idea of a strike even getting called in Britain, the same bullshit talking point gets rolled out by Tory ministers, columnists, and fellow talking heads alike: “Are we heading for another Winter of Discontent?” It’s one of those industrial dispute clichés that just won’t die, a knee-jerk invocation of some half-remembered national trauma, designed to trigger the same conditioned response in a public that, for the most part, wasn’t even alive the last time that phrase actually had meaning.

The idea is simple: scare the public into believing that strikes are inherently destructive, that they bring nothing but chaos and disorder, that when workers demand fair pay and conditions, the country grinds to a halt, and the economy crumbles. The trusted voices in the press do their job, painting a picture of uncollected bins, trains that never arrive, and striking workers refusing to bury the dead, all orchestrated by "militant union barons" hell-bent on holding the country to ransom.

It’s a well-worn playbook, one that’s been used for decades to turn striking workers into villains, to convince the average commuter that the person holding the picket sign is their enemy, rather than the people at the top hoarding profits.

For most of modern political history, this framing worked. Newspapers and broadcasters controlled the conversation. Strikers had no real way of pushing back against bad-faith coverage, no direct line to the public beyond the heavily filtered lens of Fleet Street and the BBC. The commentariat would push the narrative, the government would reinforce it, and the unions, whether they liked it or not, would always be on the defensive.

But then 2022 happened. The rail strikes came, and the government hit the Winter of Discontent panic button, the newspapers rolled out the same tired headlines, the usual suspects took to the airwaves to warn of anarchy in the streets… and for the first time in a long time, the public, for the most part, didn’t buy it. The fear didn’t take hold. The comparisons to the late 1970s felt stale and irrelevant. And most importantly, for the first time in decades, union leaders weren’t letting the media set the terms of the conversation.

The RMT, and Mick Lynch in particular, weren’t playing defence. They weren’t retreating from media attacks. They weren’t letting hostile interviews box them into a corner. Instead, they flipped the script entirely.

The (somewhat) Death of the Traditional Media

For decades, the government and the right-wing press had an easy job when it came to strikes. Print media had near-total control over how industrial action was framed, while the major TV broadcasters, especially the BBC and ITV, tended to follow their lead. Strikers rarely got a fair hearing. A government minister could go on air, confidently spew misleading figures about pay demands, and face no meaningful pushback. Union leaders could be caricatured as out-of-touch relics, as greedy power-brokers refusing to compromise. The public had little access to alternative perspectives.

But by 2022, that monopoly was sort of gone. Traditional outlets were no longer the sole gatekeepers of political messaging. Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube had completely changed the playing field. Clipped interviews, viral exchanges, and unfiltered direct-to-camera videos meant that unions no longer had to rely on favourable coverage from the mainstream press. They could reach the public themselves, without some whiny news anchor bitching on.

The RMT’s strategy, whether by design or just sheer force of circumstance, was to dominate the “clip war.” Instead of treating TV interviews as an unwinnable battle against a hostile press, they saw them as an opportunity to go viral. The goal wasn’t to win over the journalist sitting opposite them, it was to make sure that when the inevitable clip of the exchange hit social media, it was their framing that stuck. That they appeared to speak “common sense” and not seriously engage with the generally hostile questions posed to them.

Mick Lynch, in particular, proved to be very very good at this. Countless times, he walked into hostile interviews and left the interviewer looking foolish. When Sky News’ Kay Burley tried to press him on whether the RMT was orchestrating a “summer of discontent,” he calmly pointed out that the only people talking about it were the media themselves.

When Piers Morgan attempted to paint him as some kind of 1970s throwback, he laughed in his face and dismissed the line of questioning as absurd. When Tory MPs accused the RMT of being unreasonable, he methodically dismantled their claims, making them look not just dishonest, but embarrassingly unprepared.

And crucially, these moments didn’t just live and die on TV. They were clipped, shared, and amplified across social media, reaching millions of people who might never have otherwise engaged with the strikes at all. A single, well-handled TV interview would be sliced into short, digestible chunks and uploaded to Twitter and TikTok, often by “independent” political media accounts like PoliticsJOE, which built an entire brand off highlighting government hypocrisy and amplifying left-wing perspectives that mainstream broadcasters tended to ignore. These clips would then be clipped themselves, by thousands of people across Facebook, WhatsApp, and Reddit, ensuring that they spread far beyond the usual echo chambers.

Winning the Narrative Battle, One Clip at a Time

This approach completely bypassed traditional media framing. It didn’t matter if the original TV segment was meant to be a hit piece. Once the key moment was clipped and uploaded, the RMT controlled the message. Instead of being cast as the unreasonable extremists, they were seen as calm, logical, and in command of the facts - and the news host/Tory MP/commentator they were arguing with looked out of touch and stupid. Instead of being made to look like the problem, they made their opponents look clueless. And crucially, the public saw it happen.

The power of this strategy became particularly clear when government ministers tried to enter the clip war themselves. Transport Secretary Grant Shapps and various other Tories attempted to counter the RMT’s messaging by going on TV and pushing their own soundbites about how strikes were hurting ordinary people. But unlike Lynch, they struggled to handle pushback. When their claims were challenged, they floundered. Their interviews weren’t clipped and shared in a way that worked in their favour - they were then clipped by those supporting the RMT, and were shared as evidence of how out of touch they were.

This wasn’t just about one set of strikes. It was a sign of a fundamental shift in how campaigns and causes could be fought in the public sphere. The RMT and Mick Lynch didn’t just fight the government on the picket lines - they fought them in the media, and more importantly, they fought them online.

A New Playbook for Organising

The 2022 rail strikes proved that the old establishment playbook for controlling the narrative around industrial action (or any issue) is breaking down. The government and the press tried to paint the RMT as dangerous wreckers, but they lost control of the message. The unions, for the first time in decades, had a direct line to the public. They were able to counter misleading claims in real time, to use viral media moments to their advantage, and to flip the script on their opponents. Unfortunately this momentum was wasted by pointless bureaucracy around the Enough is Enough campaign - but that’s its own issue.

The government can keep trotting out the “Winter of Discontent” line all it wants. But if 2022 proved anything, it’s that the public isn’t listening the way they used to. The media’s grip on the narrative is slipping, and unions are learning how to fight back in ways that weren’t possible before. And if there’s one group that’s mastered this playbook even better than the RMT, it’s Reform UK. They understand that modern politics isn’t won in dry press conferences or balanced TV debates - it’s won in 10-30 second clips, in viral soundbites, in moments that spread like wildfire across TikTok, Facebook, and Reddit. They know that whoever dominates the clip war wins the public narrative, and right now, they’re running rings around the traditional parties.

The key difference between Reform and the RMT, though, is that while the media was outright hostile to Lynch and the rail strikes, it is far less combative toward Reform’s messaging - even if it is hostile to the institution itself. The RMT had to fight tooth and nail to get its message through the noise, yet the strategy still worked. Reform, meanwhile, doesn’t need to wage war with every hostile broadcaster; it just needs to keep feeding social media with digestible, incendiary clips, knowing full well that engagement, whether positive or negative, will do the rest.

This isn’t just a fluke strategy that works in isolated case studies like the rail strikes; it has longevity, and it’s particularly potent in reaching disenfranchised young people in areas where political engagement is low. Reform’s messaging is tailored to appeal to those who feel ignored by Westminster and alienated from mainstream politics, and their ability to dominate online spaces means they’re capturing a demographic that, until now, has largely been absent from traditional party politics.

If Labour, the Lib Dems, or even the Tories want to stop Reform from owning the political conversation, they need to start playing by the same rules: fight on the same platforms, control the same viral moments, and take the fight to where people are actually consuming politics. Because if they don’t, they’re going to find themselves outgunned, outpaced, and left behind, watching from the sidelines as the “real opposition” reshapes the public conversation one clip at a time.