Union boss under fire for Nazi claims

MILITANT union bosses have been accused of taking leave of their senses after one compared proposed anti-strike laws to Nazi Germany.

Transport Secretary Grant Shapps hit out after Mick Whelan, general secretary of train drivers’ union Aslef, accused the Government of taking the UK back to Germany, Spain and Italy in the 1930s.

Mr Whelan, whose union staged another 24-hour strike yesterday, told Radio 4’s Today programme: ‘We are virtually in what was happening in Germany, Spain and Italy in the mid-30s where you removed the right to strike, removed the right to protest, removed the right to complain, you challenged lawyers, you threatened union leaders. We are very much moving into a world I don’t think we want to be in.’

Separately, Mick Lynch, boss of the RMT union, told the New Statesman magazine how the EU had provoked ‘trouble’ in Ukraine and also claimed ‘there were a lot of corrupt politicians in Ukraine’.

‘And while they were doing that, there were an awful lot of people [in Ukraine] playing with Nazi imagery and going back to the [Second World] war, and all that,’ he said.

Sources close to Mr Shapps, who is planning to introduce new laws requiring minimum service levels during strikes, said both men had ‘taken leave of their senses’.

The Transport Secretary added: ‘Between Mick Lynch’s peddling of Kremlin propaganda and Mick Whelan’s absurd and offensive comments, the union mask has well and truly slipped.’